Competition | Spiderworking.com's Social Networking blog

March 31, 2010

Your Social Media Questions Answered – Running Polls on Facebook

This is the second in our series of blog posts answering your twitter questions from the recent contest.

Our first question comes from Jenny from @jattconsulting more info on them here. (site still under construction)

@Spiderworking How do you run a contest or a poll on facebook?

There are a number of ways of running a poll on Facebook. Which method you use is determined by what sort of results you want. If you are running the poll for research purposes and you want definite answers to your questions I would recommend using one of the applications that has been designed to run on Facebook Pages. Probably the best application currently is “Polls” which is not only the best looking application but it also makes it easy for your fans to see the options.

If however your Poll is just for fun, or designed to create more interaction on your page, using phtographs or the Notes Application can attract more users. One of my favorite Irish Facebook pages Hairy Baby runs polls using Photos on a regular basis. They load a picture or a series of pictures and use the description box to ask the question.

We recently ran a poll on our own page using the notes application and again found it a good way to encourage interaction. Because we weren’t limiting our responses to specific answers we discovered options we hadn’t considered in the original poll.

@EJQ of Eilis J Quinlan & Co. asked:

@Spiderworking. How do you UN -follow someone???

Unfollowing someone is simple.

If you know the username of the twitter user you want to unfollow go to http://www.twitter.com/useryouwanttounfollow – Make sure you are logged into twitter.

On the right hand side of their page you will see a cog symbol:

Choose “unfollow” from the drop down menu.

We’ll be answering more of your Twitter questions next week.

If you like cool social media tools don’t forget to become a fan of Spiderworking.com on Facebook where every Monday we showcase one of our favourite apps.

We’ll be answering more of your Twitter questions next week.

If you like cool social media tools don’t forget to become a fan of Spiderworking.com on Facebook where every Monday we showcase one of our favourite apps.

Tags: Facebook,Twitter,Your Questions Answered — Tags: Competition, Facebook, fan page, Questions and answers, Social media for business, social media marketing, tools —

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March 24, 2010

Your Twitter Questions Answered – How To Define Hashtags

A big thank you to everyone who entered our Twitter competition. The winner of the €50 Spiderworking.com voucher was @OscarBearGrylls.

We will be answering all the questions we were asked over the next few of weeks but here’s two for starters:

Our first question comes from @Madeline from Life Love and Everything.

@Spiderworking How do you know if an event has a twittertag and what that twittertag is?

Twitter tags or hashtags are very organic, some spring up spontaneously, some are created with a specific purpose in mind. Some take off, some trend then die quickly and some never get beyond a few tweets.

Twitter users watching the recent BBC documentary series ‘The Virtual Revolution’ were delighted to see the hashtag for the series appearing at the opening of the show, it was the talk of twitter for most of the programme. Sadly twitter tags are not always as easy to identify. Some events can attract more than one #tag as the recent battle to establish a tag for ‘BBC Question Time’. Both #bbcquestiontime and #bbcqt were being adopted by viewers with most finally settling on #bbcqt, probably because it’s shortness allowed more comment. Although, as far as I can see, the BBC did not create this tag, they have actively adopted it even advertising it on the ‘Qustion Time’ site.

Conferences and events tend to invent their own tags and will often list them on their websites. Some display a twitterfeed screen at the event including the tag. Obviously if you aren’t at the event and they haven’t indicated the tag on their website, it is harder to discover what it is. In this case, searching the twitterfeeds of tweeps you know are attending could help.

There are a few #tag directories, Hashtags.org being perhaps the best, it allows you to either view current trending hashtags or search one of your choice. The result is a list of tweets containing the tag and a graph, showing the tag’s popularity over time. Another directory; TagDef defines #tags, again you can choose from trending tags or input your own. The site offers you a definition of that tag and a list of tweets using it. The definitions are, like Wikipedia, user generated so it is worth comparing them with the twitter stream to confirm the meaning.

Our second question comes from our winner @OscarBearGrylls who asked:

@spiderworking how many companies have used your services to launch them on twitter?

This is a hard question for me to answer as we offer training to groups as well as setting up accounts for individual users so for now that number will have to remain a pretty vague up to 50. We most recently trained a group of Journalists from ‘The Nationalist’ and are looking forward to reading their tweets in the future.

We’ll be answering more of your Twitter questions next week.

If you like cool social media tools don’t forget to become a fan of Spiderworking.com on Facebook where every Monday we showcase one of our favourite apps.

Tags: Twitter — Tags: #tag, Competition, hash tag, Questions and answers, Social media for business, tools, Twitter —

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March 16, 2010

How to run a Twitter competition

Running a competition or draw can be a great way to attract new followers.

You can offer a prize draw for those who retweet a particular phrase, for tweeps who uses a particular #tag or a simple have a draw from new followers. It not only helps raise your twitter profile but it also adds a bit of fun and interaction to your tweets.

You can of course run the contest manually but there are some tools that can make it easier:

Twitrand.com allows you to either choose one follower randomly from all of your followers or choose a winner from those who have ReTweeted a particular phrase.

Tweetaways.com has a free service and a very reasonably priced paid service. The free service allows you to pick a winner from those who Retweet a phrase. The biggest difference between this and Twitrand is that Tweetaways requires you to verify your twitter account. When you sign up it sends you a unique key that you can use in all your contests. The paid service allows you to run the entire competition through the application, giving you more stats etc.

If you want to draw from a group of followers, for example you may want to choose a winner from every 100 followers, I have found two applications that work well in conjunction with each other.

Random.org allows you to pick a number randomly from a set that you specify. For example 101-200. To save the hassle of counting back through your twitter followers you can use MyTweeple.com which lists your followers numerically.

If you like playing with cool social media tools join our Facebook page where we have introduced “Monday Morning Cool Tools”. Designed to blow away the Monday morning blues each week we will be featuring one of our favorite social media apps.