Emily Ho

Social media specialist, blogger

Identity Crisis

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So perhaps “crisis” isn’t the right word, however “confusion” might suit.

As most of you know, I’m a social media junkie. It’s part of my job for goodness sakes! I founded my company around it. This is where I admit that I may have inadvertently screwed with my social media identity personally.

See, I first joined Twitter as @emilysandford. I talked to local people, followed news sites and marketing firms, talked about marketing and all things in my professional life.

About 1 year later, I started my weight loss blog, Skinny Emmie. I started talking about all things weight loss, fitness, and food, which I thought may be annoying to those following @emilysandford and my normal marketing blabber. Thus, @skinnyemmie was started.

I manage several Twitter accounts in addition to my own 2 (and now 3 with company Twitter @authsocial), so it’s not a problem to continue this way. This weekend though, I was at a conference and I didn’t know whether I was @emilysandford or @skinnyemmie. It was about marketing and social media. I have a bigger following at @skinnyemmie. I tweet more frequently there. So would it make sense that I combine the 2 accounts and just be the single person that I am?

Here’s our topic differences:

In the end, it’s all me no matter where I’m tweeting from. I’m thinking of consolidating, but just want some feedback:

What should I do?

Social Timing

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Have you ever gone to a party and scanned the room for people you know? You zoom in on your targets, then approach and try to organically pop into the conversation. After a few seconds of overhearing the conversation, you realize that it was the completely wrong time to join in. Your happy face just interrupted a deep discussion about someone’s family members recent cancer diagnosis. Gah.

Two things with social that I see all the time from both individuals and small businesses:

  1. Poor timing: This includes not responding in a timely manner (an expectation of “timely” is set by your customer), not engaging while your customer is online (instead, only when it is convenient for you to do so), and not posting content when your customers are most likely to see it.
  2. Improper context: This one stretches the gamut of possible oopsies, from misappropriate use of a hashtag to reacting in haste to a negative post without reading the entire background. This causes major foot-in-mouth syndrome.

To fix poor timing:

  • Think about when people are using your product or when they need you. I had an experience with Verizon Wireless this week where I had no email service and it seemed to be a widespread problem. Unfortunately, when the social media team clocked out, all the in-progress help they were giving users went with it.
  • You can utilize services like Crowdbooster so you can see when your followers are most active so your tweets have the most potential for impact.
  • You can also just observe when your followers seem to be most active. When are they responding to your blog or to your Facebook posts? You can also look at research like that in the infographic below from Argyle Social.

To fix improper context:

  • Listen before you pipe in. If you see your name come up, make sure you read the conversation participants past tweets so you can reply with proper context.
  • If you’re unsure of context, just ask. A short “is there something I can help you with?” goes a long way.

Here’s a great infographic that provides data-driven insights into the social media timing.

Data-driven social media marketing from Argyle Social

Do you schedule your social media activities around periods of high engagement? Any tips?

RSS Authentically Emmie

RSS Authentically Social

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