Simple Twitter Strategies to Grow your Business – Interview with Nick Ellison

Watch on Video:

Listen via Podcast:

You really can build new connections through social media! Janet and Nick met through Google+, now they have a face-to-face chat on a hangout!

Here are some things that are covered in this interview:

• How to set up Twitter Lists
• Nick’s new Twitter training program: Zero to Twitter
• The excuse of not having enough time for social media
• How to use Hootsuite to create lists on Twitter and monitor all social sites
• Using Hootlet

Where can you find out about Nick Ellison and his products?

He has a FREE social media blueprint you can download: nickellison.net/blueprint

Here’s his new program: Zero to Twitter

 

 

 

For those of you that like to read, here is the full transcript:

I want to welcome Nick.

Hello!

And I will talk about a little bit who he is in a second. And we have also, of course, Kimmy, the social media puppet.

Hi everyone! It’s great to see you all. Thanks for coming on the show today Nick.

Welcome! This is weird.

Quick question, have you ever been interviewed by a puppet before?

Yes, regular occurrence, happens all the time.

And I’d like to explain a little bit about Kimmy’s background Nick so you that understand. Kimmy is, she is our social media puppet because we’ve been teaching her social media and she actually owns a salon. So she is a salon owner, small business owner and as we teach her how to market her social media through her salon we are recording it. So she may ask you questions coming from the salon perspective today, does that make sense?

Yeah, that’s cool.

That’s where I get my pink hair, don’t you love it?

Lovely!

Now it’s all over, let me see if I can fix that.

First what I want to do is talk a little bit about where Nick came from, how I am connected with Nick then we’re going to talk about some things. He’s going to teach us some valuable tips today with Twitter, with Hootsuite, we’ll get into that. So Nick Ellison is how I’m connected with Nick was through Google+. We were talking about apps, we like apps. Is that what we discussed the first time?

Yeah, I think so. I remember some conversation about apps, yeah yeah.

Yeah.

Something of buying the calendar out there, if you’d recommend it or somebody else did it or posted it for the new calendar out there.

Yep, exactly. We were talking about that and I mentioned to you gWhiz and you were like you haven’t heard of some of those things so we talked about these techies, techy things and that’s how we connected, so that’s awesome. Nick comes from, his background is he call himself a social media geek.

I like geeks.

Geeks are cool now, I know. A tech and internet enthusiast, blogger, speaker, coach love helping you get to grips with the tools that help you grow your business. And one of the things that brought to my attention when I was watching through my circles and watching Nick is that he has a new Twitter product. And so I thought that our audience would love to hear about Twitter and how to use Twitter in their business. So Nick, thank you, first off thank you so much for taking your time out and joining us.

No problem, thank you for having me.

So tell me, why did you start/decide to do this Twitter product as your product.

I guess probably, usually before this I started out in Facebook more than anything else but there was just a lot of Facebook products out there, there’s a lot of Facebook coaches out there and I don’t think the people quite understand it how powerful Switzer really, really is I think. And it came to light we run this thing called social media cafe and every month we take over a cafe in our town, we move around every month and different businesses come in. And the best it’s free, they get free advice for social media. We just help a lot of businesses come in, they get to ask some questions, we’re doing some demos, we do some talks, that sort of thing. And I just think from the questions that were coming from that event people didn’t really understand what Twitter was about and they were just generally tweeting, not getting engagement at all. Just kind of generally self-promoting. Just don’t think they quite understood how much data was out there for kind of listening and then trying to find people to engage with and just get involved in other conversation rather than straight out tweet promotionals. That is why I’ll have a look at Twitter first and try to help people with that skills on Twitter and develop that really.

That’s awesome. I love Twitter. And you know, I know that my partner, Lisa Saline she’s got 18,000 Twitter followers. And you know, what can a salon owner do with Twitter?

I guess, same again really is looking for conversation that are relevant or people you can find to engage with. It doesn’t necessarily, like when you say about mass following. That is the first thing that people think about is trying to build up mass followers, I’ll follow you, you follow me and it looks great because we’ve got this big number but actually you don’t really engage with most of those people very often, it just becomes a battery of noisy stream of people that your following. A lot of those people on Twitter really interested in what you do so it’s a bit smart to try and find people having conversation related to the things that you do, your general location. People are doing different things in your location and might be interested in your business. I saw a nail salon, let’s say, I don’t know, kind of just restyling but maybe when kids drop by, moms drop off their kids at school, it might be conversations around that you could look for. Maybe whether they are stay-home moms or moms that don’t need to go to work. You might be able to search for topics of conversation that they would tweet about and find ways of engaging with those people just to get on their radar, not to be sales-kind weird because it might come across as weird if you’d get it wrong. But yeah, just find a topic of conversation that way you can get on people’s radar.

So for me maybe a good list would be the wedding planners, event planners because all the ladies like to come in and get their hair done. So if I keep a conversation with them, they’ll remember who I am.

Yeah, that’s it. I mean if it follows on to something where you can entice them towards coming to visit you or arrange something later on, not so bad. But right now it’s just a case on getting on their radar, just having a conversation with them and yeah, you’re noticed.

What would you say time-wise needs to be put in to Twitter, would you talk about that at all?

It’s difficult with Twitter. I don’t think, I’ve had this conversation a few times. I guess it’s all about social media, not just Twitter but social media. Like people how much time should I dedicate to my social media and it’s difficult to put a time allocation to it. It’s a bit like saying I’ve got an hour a day for Twitter, no one has an hour a day to answer a day to answer their phones for instance. I respond to a tweet when someone tweets me. I don’t say between 2 and 3 today I’m going to answer phone calls. That’s how integrated comes within your daily lives. When you start getting more used to Twitter it isn’t a lot of your time that you put aside to manage your Twitter, it just kinds of integrate with your day.

I like that answer. Yes, it’s just responding, that kind of thing. But now do you ever hear that where they say I don’t have enough time? But you know that has been a big thing and I think Twitter is one of those that people really think that one especially is going to take a lot of time. So that’s why I asked that just because what’s your response to ‘I don’t have any time, I don’t have enough time for Twitter, I don’t have enough time for social media.’ What would your respond to that?

Everything does take some time, you’ve got to find the time. You’ve got to weigh up that time on what you really want to spend your time on. I think that’s one of the most valuable marketing a relationship – things you can do with your time. I know no one here has says I’m going to work for 4 hours a day and I’ll spend the other 4 on Twitter. Everyone’s busy all day long. Everyone’s just and we’re all finding time, I find time for you, you find time for it, we’ve got two business to run here. Yeah, I can run multiple Twitter account if that’s what I need to. You have to find the time.

Awesome. I love that answer. And what about, can you break down a little bit what your products about? Your Twitter product like you mentioned using Hootsuite for the Twitter search steams, that kind of thing.

Yeah so I decided to go down this route of zero to expert, Twitter is just the first call. I’ve got a series of social media training calls I want to put out but just trying to find out different ways of train people. I was trying to cover all basics really and I ended up with zero to expert, which is terrible advice for most people that everyone tells you to sit down. The bit that you really enjoy is the more advanced stuff but that doesn’t really pull new businesses in. New businesses just want to get started on Twitter. So I went down this road of the idea of zero to expert. So taking something off month from literally registering with Twitter all the way through to using things like the social media dashboard and go to more advanced things like the keyword geo location, target, things like that. So just take in a customer who have never had an account through the journey of learning all the different ins and outs of various social media platforms but this ones specifically Twitter.

Awesome. Okay and then can you detail us a little bit about how to use the Hootsuite? What do you use Hootsuite the most for? And this audience may not exactly know what Hootsuite is, could you explain what Hootsuite is and how you use it for Twitter and you could talk about the other social media platforms, too.

Yeah sure. Hootsuite is a social media management dashboard. So it’ll let you manage most of your social media platform. I still use it myself for Twitter more than anything else. It will let you manage Facebook. It will let you manage your Google+ page, not your profile. Your LinkedIn account. It’s really good for managing your LinkedIn group actually so you could pull in all your LinkedIn group because they’re quite messy. You go into LinkedIn, each going 20 groups you want to have conversation, you’ve got to keep flipping pages on LinkedIn so it’s bit of enormous. You’ve just got to pull all your groups in and can see all each group in a structured column format. You can have different conversation with different group in one screen, it’s pretty powerful. But still personally I still use Hootsuite 90% for Twitter because it’s really good aggregating the data from Twitter, big columns you pull in different streams of content and you kind pull in your list, if you have a list of your social media experts, a list of your local businesses, local cafes, local government, unused resources. Whatever it is that you want, everybody that you can follow them or not follow them. What you’re doing is aggregating the data that Twitter has on to a nice, easy-to-read format that’s all in one screen.

That’s a great idea, I like that tip. I love Hootsuite for a lot of my stuff, too. But I think being able to follow a list on LinkedIn is super key for me but I also love the Twitter list.

Yeah because again with Twitter, the twitter.com platform just kind of infuriates me a little bit trying to use it. It’s kind with the app, you’ve got to be on a different page every time you want to do something. So every list you want to go to, you go to your profile, you got to go lists, select the list and you’re in one screen of that list. If you want to go and look at another list, you have to go back, look at that list open it up and it’s just clunky. So Hootsuite just shuffle my list if I want them and I just vary them, depends on what I’m interested in this week I’ll shot some, list down and come back on it later on or lists or interests in, I’ll pull up in Hootsuite. It’s just flexible, just really makes it easy to use.

Love it, love it. And yes, Hootsuite is my preferred product also, preferred to the other one is Buffer so I kind of switched between those two. But I do find Hootsuite use as the same as what you suggested.

See on the Buffer side of things, I’ve started using, I use the Hootlet and the browser, I started using that a lot now.

Oh yeah, it’s the same thing as Buffer, really but, yeah. And I have it but I never used it. I’m using Buffer, I’m like why am I doing that.

One of the cool things I like about the Hootlet now it’s integrated within Chrome. So let’s say you’re talking about salon and you go back and thinking about SEO and you want your website ranking so you think about keywords, phrases and searches that people would search for in Google to find your business. But then you can geo-search tweets using scorecard. When you do your search for the Google or the Google map, the Hootlet integrates what Twitter sent about that subject or locaton so right there on google.com, on the little side. What you call the hoop installed as a plug in on the right hand side which you can click on it and it opens up? So if I did a search for hair or nail salon within your area. Hootesuite will then search for those tweets send from the area right from Google. So it just pull it in and you can see tweets that are related to the Google search and same with Google maps, so it’s pretty powerful.

Wow.

That’s amazing, that’s terrific.

When did that, how long has that been available?

I think only a few months.

Okay, okay I think I may have seen that before because I do have it but I just you know, you go so fast sometimes that I didn’t realize it. So you told me, as well.

It’s not perfect, it’s still a little bit glitchy but it’s interesting though. It’s interesting what it can do.

Now back to, talk about Google+, you know the reason for the Hootsuite not being able to link to our personal profiles? I don’t think any of them can, correct?

Yeah, it’s just the thing that Google would not let them integrate with the albrazema. They both let them access the api that’s going to let you update your personal profile, they will let you access your pages.

The page, yeah, so that’s what I just don’t really understand that if it’s ever going to open up because that’s the only platform or you can even post to your LinkedIn personal profile but you can’t, not on Google+.

It’s a Google decision somewhere and we don’t really need that.

Well they own it so what can we say!

I mean, I thought they’re going to say no, you can’t use Hootsuite to manage Google. It would have been across the board so why you can manage a page but not the profile I don’t know. But yeah, it’s still, you still can’t use Hootsuite to manage your Google+ profile.

Yeah and that’s where we tend to connect to a lot of people, more on the profile thank the actual page itself, so…

Yeah I still can’t do the same.

Well good. So Kimmy d you have additional questions?

Well you know I guess how about a direct message on Twitter? Do you see a lot of value with the direct messaging tool to pm.

Yes I use it quite a bit. Generally just the people I’ve already established a relationship with to have a private conversation. I don’t really connect with new people, it get’s a bit spammy, doesn’t it? You look at your inbox, you’ve probably, if you’re connected to a few thousand people at least you’re going to start getting spam coming through your inbox.

I know when I first started out that people told me I should do auto message but I just didn’t seem that that was really good at building relationships.

We probably went through that stage of doing it to do direct message because everyone thought it was great. And you realize this is not great, that’s all. They’re spamming each other, let’s all stop doing this stupid.

Well, you’re right. It’s evolved and became more spammy. Back in the days it wasn’t like that. So everything becomes that way. If any platform allows it to happen, it will happen. It will happen with Pinterest where they had to do the no-follow links because everybody was doing spam over there. So if it happens to every platform, so they have to put the kibosh on it.

I think it was Gary V who said market has ruined everything. It has evolved as we kind of do. Rude email, I think it was first and he was saying and just paraphrasing but yeah, we work out to leverage everything we can from that platform and then ruin it.

Yep, that would be us.

We’re all quite open on what we do these days.

All good intentions, for sure.

Yes and we’ve learned overtime that the spamming doesn’t work. So you cannot do spamming. So talk a little bit about your free ebook that you offer.

Okay it’s pretty good for beginners that just want to understand what each network is and so the Social Media Blueprint, it breaks down Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google+ and YouTube. And it breaks down what each platform is, what they do, a few stats on each and between 5-10 best practice tips for each platform. So beginners’ stuff to intermediate. It’s not really an expert thing, but yeah.

Nice. Okay. And then we will put that in our show notes also so that we will have that on the blog and in the show notes and in YouTube so that people can access that if they like it, nickellison.net/blueprint so and no www for you. Don’t put www.

I think to myself in an inforgraphic the other week because I have used lead pages or not, I just lead pages to fill the pages and then all on the graphics wrote www and post them out and never thought about it.

Oh no.

No www, just nickellison.net/blueprint

That’s great and then let’s give the link to your Zero to Twitter and that is, now this one does have the www.

You cannot leave those one out, that’s on site.

And that’s twitter.zerotoexpert.com. And then where can we find you also you, also Nick where’s the best place to connect with you? I know you’re all over but what, where would you suggest?

I mean nickellison.net is the easiest way to find all the social channels but you can pretty much get me on Facebook, Twitter and Google+, they’re probably I’m most active on.

Great, all right. Well thank you so much for your time today and we are looking forward to learning more about Twitter from you.

Fantastic, thank you for your time.

Thank you.

No worries, nice to meet you both.

Bye!