Lists, Hashtags and Other Twitter Tips for Success

Greetings everybody. Welcome to the Wednesday, March 25th, 2015 episode of Free Webinar Wednesdays. This is Eric Cook, and I am with WSI Internet Consulting where we work with businesses and organizations on helping them better understand and leverage the power of the internet as a strategic business tool. You can learn more about me and WSI online at www.poweredbywsi.com. With me this week is my good friend and Free Webinar Wednesday partner, Mr. Jeff Simpkins. Jeff, say hello to everybody out there in Free Webinar Wednesday world.

Greetings everybody, this is Jeff Simpkins. I'm with Community Bank Consulting, Inc. You can learn more about me and Community Bank Consulting, Inc. online at www.communitybankconsulting.com.

Excellent. I do see we have one individual that's dialed in via the telephone, so we want to make sure we offer our standard public service announcement. Unless you have an international calling plan or picked from the actual additional numbers list, assuming you're dialing from the United States, just note that that phone number a lot of times defaults to Canada, and we don't want Free Webinar Wednesdays to turn into a $40 long-distance phone bill for you. So if If you're listening to the recording of this, doesn't matter because you're not dialing in. But those of you that are attending live, just make sure that you go ahead and click on that additional number and then pick the one that's appropriate for your country. So curious to see if we have any outside of the United Statesers, if that's even the proper way of saying it. I don't want to say foreigners because that just doesn't sound right. But maybe if if you're joining us internationally, feel free to post your location into the chat box. We always love it when we get people from over the pond or across the pond. sitting in on our show, even though it may be a little bit later in the day for you folks.

We're a very North American crowd. We have lots of US and Canada folks that join us every week.

Yep. So we— it's good to work in an A every once in a while so the Canadian friends know that we're speaking their language. And we'll say behavior with a U. So I see we already have a comment in the chat box, and I have a feeling I might know who that's actually from.

Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Let's see, does that count as international?

I've been to certain parts of Mississippi, and sometimes it feels like you might be in a different country, but that is still very much the United States of America. So, too funny, too funny. So one other little minor housekeeping item. I know a lot of you are frequent flyers here on Free Webinar Wednesdays, but if this is your first time joining us, we do like and enjoy and appreciate the comments through the chat box, so feel free to find that in your control panel on the right-hand side and use it as you wish. And today's show and all shows are recorded and made available over at freewebinarwednesdays.com, so certainly would love for you to share and send recordings around to spread the word and get other people aware of the show. So Jeff, in the pre-call chitchat, you indicated that you're feeling a little down and Maybe we can cheer you up a little bit. Not that I want to put you on the spot, but you've got a little bit of a Mac dilemma that you're faced with. Do you want to share with the audience, and maybe we can offer up some advice?

Yes, my 4-year-old MacBook Air has apparently— it's getting close to the end of its useful life. My trackpad is going out for the second time in about 12 months. Gasp, gasp, I'm having to use a Logitech mouse today because I can't right-click with my trackpad.

Is it at least wireless or is it a wired mouse?

No, it's at least a wireless mouse. There you go.

Well, yeah, and you know, the challenge that I think you're going to have, and I don't know if anybody out there has looked at it, but with Mac's announcement of their new MacBook Air, they've done away with all the USB ports, and you have one connector for power.

And—

Well, if you want to connect USB or video—

Yeah, I was actually looking at that this morning, and I have to admit that the gold version really appeals to me. That model is not quite available yet, so I think I'm going to have to take action before that becomes available.

Yeah.

And one of the things that I'm really considering, I absolutely love this MacBook. Air. I got it almost to the day 4 years ago. And it actually came out of the clearance and reconditioned. It was a MacBook Air that someone had ordered and returned. And when I got it, it was as if it had never been touched. Clearly, they must have either never opened the box or opened the box, looked at it, and sent it back because it was configured exactly like I wanted it. The sad part about buying things from the clearance and reconditioned store at Apple is you don't get that much of an outstanding deal, but I saved a couple hundred bucks. But one of the things that I'm— up until now I have at least kept both a PC and a Mac in my arsenal. For the last— what has it been, Eric? Probably 6 or 7 years ago you turned me on to Macs, I think. Probably 7, actually.

Yeah.

But I've reached the point I don't want to maintain a PC anymore. So my debate that I'm having with myself at this point is, do I stick with a MacBook Air, which maxes out at 512 GB? of flash memory available, or do I go half a pound to 2 pounds heavier than the MacBook Air and go with a MacBook Pro? But the memory that you can get on the MacBook Pro with solid-state memory is up to 1 terabyte. A couple decisions to make in the next few days.

Yeah, well, I know You and I have talked a lot of times on Free Webinar Wednesdays about our utilization of cloud storage. And whether it's Google Drive or Dropbox or any of the other services that are out there, yeah, it's great to have everything in the cloud, but I think we're both somewhat to an extent digital pack rats in the sense that we like to have information available to us on the hard drive. And that's one of the reasons why I've never pulled the trigger on an Air or even a Chromebook or something along those lines that relies predominantly on the web to have everything. Because if I'm on an airplane and I want to get access to a file, even though I may not ever really, really need it, I want to have that mental, if I needed to get to something, I have it. But yet it's fully synchronized in the cloud in a couple of different areas, so I'm protected. And I did move my computer to a 1 TB solid-state drive about a year and a half ago, which gave me another couple of years of life into my old MacBook Pro. And I've been really happy with it. My vote is to go with the Pro with the terabyte, and I think the weight difference isn't going to be tremendous. And, you know, if you need to have a PC version, you can use a service like Parallels or something along those lines, and you can always install a different instance of that just on the off chance that you're working with a client, you have to be able to test something in a PC environment. So that would be my—

That's interesting. I have a need for a PC about About one time a year now. I still do my business tax return on my own. I actually started— when I started this business, I guess it will be 9 years ago this year, I started doing my own tax return using TurboTax Corporate, which is only available in Windows operating systems. So that is literally the only thing I use Windows for at this point. I do use a postage software. I use stamps.com. They've done a pretty good job of making that software usable using a web-based interface now. So I don't have a need for a PC that often even though their proprietary software still runs on Windows.

Yeah.

Daniel said, go high-end. I'm guessing by that, Daniel, you mean go with the 1 TB of memory on the MacBook Pro.

Exactly. Although Bob does make a good point. When Windows comes out with their new version 10 operating system, and I don't know exactly when that's going to be, but I've got a godson who is a student at Illinois Institute of Technology which is a pretty geeky school, and a lot of them get access to stuff very quickly. and we'll say all of it is legally, wink wink. But as college students, they tend to download stuff and take a peek. And he's got a few people that he knows in school that have actually gone through and been able to access Windows 10 and have been very impressed with it. So something to think about. The Mac operating system certainly is a little different than jumping into a Windows 10 environment.

That's a good point, Bob. Thanks for sharing that. If you happen to know when Windows 10 is supposed to be available, shoot me a message in the question window. I'd love to know more about that. I actually did, when I got this MacBook Air, I bought— I think I got Parallels and got Windows XP or something like that.

Yep.

It ended up adding $300 or $400 to the cost of the machine. Even though that's not an ungodly amount of money, it's a lot of money to spend for something that you use about once a year.

Once a year, exactly. I have used Parallels, and I've also used VMware. I don't know if there's necessarily a difference between the two of those, but those are relatively inexpensive. If you can get a copy of Windows 10 and pull that down, that might just give you an easy out to having at least a PC available to you with a minimal investment. So it looks like sometime this summer Microsoft's going to be rolling that out, and I've been keeping an eye on that as well. So thanks for the reminder there, Bob. Cool. Alrighty. Well, I figured we'd have a little input from everybody in the audience. Yep, that's good. See, we get stuff out of this just as much as our audience does, so thanks for being sounding boards. Also, I do notice that we do have one individual with their hand up. Usually that signifies we are going to unmute a line and bring somebody in to talk, but we, due to technical issues over the past, we've not used the hand up. So looks like, Greg, if you have a question, feel free to go ahead and type it in the chat box, or maybe you accidentally raised your hand and didn't realize it. But if you have a question or a comment, just go ahead and toss it into the chat box and we'll go ahead and take peek at it. So I know that the formal topic for today is to chat about Twitter, and what kind of prompted this was I've been doing a couple of webinars, and after the webinar I've been getting some follow-up questions. And actually, one of the webinars I did, I put together a bunch of slides, and one of the slides actually had to be changed because I delivered the deck after Twitter actually removed a functionality. After it kind of reconnected to Google. So I will kind of give you a little bit of that explanation when we get into it. But if you are Twitter users, just as a heads up, if you could fire up your Twitter account and be ready because we are going to go through the process of actually creating an event hashtag. I will show you how to measure it and kind of do that. And then while we are actually talking, you can create some tweets and do some stuff. And then we will pull a report at the end and show how we can measure some engagement on Twitter. It might be kind of a neat process. So fire up those Twitter accounts, we'll let you multitask. And while you're doing that, there's 2 other things that the banker in me caught over the last couple of weeks that we've not had an opportunity to chat about. And I wanted to get Jeff's opinion on this as well because he also does a lot of work in the banking space. But recently Facebook announced that it was going— and this was kind of rumored about a year ago when somebody hacked the Messenger system and found that there was some code that made room for payment details, but this was formally announced earlier this month that Facebook is providing the capability to send payments via its messaging app called Messenger. And Google, not to be outdone, has now announced that they're working on a project which they're calling Pony Express, which is kind of an extension of their Google Wallet, which is going to allow you to send and receive money and pay bills directly within Gmail. And as is typically the case with Google, most of these functionalities are rolled out to the free version of Gmail first, and then they release it into the business apps environment, which is what Jeff and I are on. So some of this, much like the inbox functionality that they've added for Gmail, we don't get access to right away. But I was curious on Jeff's thoughts, and of course if we've got any bankers in the audience, You know, banks have typically controlled the payment process with checking accounts and debit cards and ATM and being the custodian of cash. And now you've got companies like Facebook and Google which are occupying a majority of our time getting into the payment process. And, you know, is this something people should be worried about? Is this something— would you trust your payment information with Facebook to send money back and forth to people? So I'm curious on Jeff's take on this, of what sort of impact this may have maybe long-term on the banking sector. And then maybe those of you that are attending live, chat in and let me know, would you use a service like this to transfer money? Do you trust Facebook and Google to send payments? So Jeff, what do you think? Something to be worried about as a banker?

If you are worried about it as a banker, you are a little late to the game. You should have gotten worried about these types of services about 6 or 8 years ago when PayPal really started coming into the space. I apologize, that's kind of a smart answer. I didn't mean it to come across that way, but I mean, it's just going to happen. It's one of those things that just has evolved in business, and it's something that financial institutions, banks, and credit unions are going to have to face. There are lots of non-financial institution entities entering this space, and I don't think that's going to stop or slow down.

Yeah.

You know, you asked, is it something that I use? I don't use any of these types of of payment services, just because I think, you know, I'm not in the demographic that has grown up using this type of thing. I think it has widespread appeal to folks that are in their 20s and younger. They love to, you know, do everything from split Uber fares to— split restaurant tabs and things like that using apps like this. I just, I don't tend to use that kind of stuff. I do use PayPal when things are— when PayPal is the best way to pay for something, but I tend to be a heavy credit card and debit card user and pretty much stick to those things. What about you? What are your thoughts?

Well, you know, I kind of am the same, even though I joke and say you're way older than me, so I don't want to lump myself into being an old guy, wink wink, nudge nudge.

I don't either, but I'm outside of the demographic that this kind of stuff really appeals to.

Yeah, I guess for me I would be almost more apt to Whether trust is the right word or support, but I'd almost be more apt to live within Google just because when it does get rolled out, because knowing that I'm a Google Apps for Business customer and I have, you know, I'm paying for the service, I guess that gives me a sense of extra level of security. Not that any company would put something like this out that would be insecure, but I think with Facebook being a free service, and I've had some personal experiences actually with the Messenger app that have creeped me out and I've I've uninstalled it. I don't know if I told this story, but I was actually out with friends and we were talking about somebody that a mutual friend of mine went to college with, and I had mentioned his name in conversation, and I was using the Messenger app, and this was right about the time that everybody was worried that Messenger was listening to your information and scanning your emails and turning on your microphone without your knowledge because they're Their privacy statement said they could, and it was really weird because when I got back to my computer the next day, I opened up Facebook and I saw all of these updates from the guy that we were talking about at the bar last night. And I had not corresponded with him on Facebook at all in the past several months. There's really no reason for him to start appearing in my feed other than the fact that Charles and I had been talking about Chris. When we were at the restaurant, sitting at the bar, going, "Hey, you remember the days you lived down the same hall as Chris did and wonder what he's up to?" Da da da da da. We used his last name, but that's the only thing that I could pick up that Facebook was listening through my pocket and said, "Oh, maybe Eric wants to know more about what Chris is up to." So that kind of freaked me out, and I uninstalled Messenger, and I've not reinstalled it on my phone since then. And if somebody does message me, I can still fire up the web-based version of Facebook and respond that way. But I'm no longer using the Messenger app. So for that reason, I think I would be a little suspect of trusting Facebook, although they probably know that I'm talking about them right now, so the gig is up, I bet. But I'm very curious to see what Google does.

I think I may have mentioned this on Free Webinar Wednesdays before, but the night it came out on HBO, I actually watched the Edward Snowden documentary Citizenfour. And it was just creepy because one of the things that he did after he left the States was he literally disconnected the voice over IP phone set in his hotel room because he indicated that those voice over IP phone sets have the ability of turning on the microphone and eavesdropping. So it's a really interesting movie and gives you some things to think about if you haven't seen Citizenfour on HBO.

Yeah, very, very, very— that's the Edward Snowden kind of documentary, isn't it?

Uh-huh, it sure is. So there's a couple comments in the question box. Daniel indicated he's surprised that PayPal didn't preempt these apps that are coming out now creating the digital wallet. And he indicated PayPal allows you to choose which accounts, which account pays.

You are paying from.

And additional features like that. Yep. And then Hugo indicated he is not really concerned with Facebook doing payments. He thinks PayPal is more concerned. And he indicated he uses PayPal regularly to transfer money to friends. Split bitter checks, pay for Girl Scout cookies, and do things like that.

Yeah.

You know, I wonder if perhaps I'm more open to these type apps because I have worked so much in the banking space, because I'm familiar that the requirements under Reg E You know, if they hit your bank account up and take money out of your bank account, you've got some protections under Reg E that you can make some pretty specific requests of your financial institution.

Yeah, to get money back.

In that way.

What I'm almost predicting is— and I'm guilty of it because I rarely have cash in my wallet— but what I'm predicting is these P2P payments Even though you can pay bills and maybe they would like you to spend more or do bigger dollar volume, I'm almost thinking that these are just going to take the place of cash really. And if you want to make a bigger transaction, you'll want to do it online via a credit card or maybe write a check or something along those lines. But if you are out and about and you need to give somebody $20 or split a bill, Instead of pulling out cash and then, well, I only owe $15, but all I have is a $20. Does somebody have change for a $20? This is just going to create convenience, and the necessity for carrying cash with you is going to be minimized. But I don't know as if it's going to make a huge impact on the bigger payment system. I think we're just going to see it have more of an impact on the need to carry cash with us. That's kind of how I would see myself using it, and I suspect that's maybe the way that it's going to roll out. We'll see.

I'm always fascinated by these types of things. Many of these systems can be such a pain that they end up not being worth using. I had a client Oh, a year or so ago that just insisted on paying using the Chase payment system like this and sent me a couple transactions that weren't huge dollar amounts, but it kicked in their fraud alert and just ended up taking days and days to get paid. and all the things I had to go through to get paid. I just— they're great for smaller dollar amounts, but when you start getting into the hundreds of dollars, a lot of times these type systems can be so challenging that there end up being other ways that are easier to handle the transactions.

Yeah, I would agree. Well, there we got a couple of those things out of the way, and now we're gonna spend the last half an hour Digging into Twitter, which is what we promised everybody. And we may even have some people that are on the webinar going, all right, are we going to talk about Twitter or not? Let's get to it. #HurryUp. So speaking of the hashtags, I said if you have a Twitter account, fire it up. We are going to go ahead and actually create an event hashtag for today. And hopefully we will get some of you to do some tweeting while we are talking. But I oftentimes will get asked, we do a social media boot camp and we train bankers on how to kind of leverage social media from an organizational perspective, but how to use it personally as well. And one of the more common questions when it comes to a hashtag is, how do you get a hashtag? Do you have to register it like a domain name? Do you own it? What's the process like? And my answer is somewhat flippant. You just use it. And they are like, well yeah, but what does that mean? So the effective way or the best way to use a hashtag is to first make sure that it is unique to what it is that you are doing. You don't want to do #FinalFour if you are going to be doing some sort of a conference that has Final Four when everybody else in the world right now is using the Final Four hashtag because they are in the March Madness or whatever is coming up for basketball, college basketball. Your message is going to get lost in all of that. You are not going to be able to differentiate between what is going on. So what I like to do first is typically just go right to Twitter, because normally even though hashtags are used across all different platforms in Facebook, and Instagram, and Twitter, and Pinterest, if you find that a hashtag is not being used in Twitter, there is a really good chance that it is not being used anywhere else. So if you go into Twitter and you just do a search, and you can see I already did my search just to check, but I'm going to do a search for Twitter FWW. And you don't have to do mixed case, you can do all lowercase. But if I go in and I do a search to see, hey, is there anybody out there that is using the hashtag #TwitterForFreeWebinarWednesdays? And you can see that there is not. So now we can go ahead and we can say, hey, let's use this hashtag. Because we know we are the only ones out there using it. So if your organization is doing a community event, participating in a conference, or you are putting on a conference, do a check. Make sure. And if it is something that is already being used, consider tossing maybe 15 on there for the year, or throwing something on that has a region. You can see I put FWW. I don't want to use just #Twitter because if I did that chances are that's going to already be used by a lot of people, and we're not going to be able to find what it is that we're talking about. So you can see all this information that people are using to talk about Twitter. So when we put the FWW, that makes it uniquely ours. So if you're out there doing some tweeting, let's go ahead and do that. And if we go home, I'll just go ahead and create, looking forward To hashtag with Jeff Simpkins today. Tweet away folks. There, so now I'm going to go ahead just so we can go ahead and get that started. So now we've got a hashtag out there. So as we talk about different Twitter things, let's go ahead and Well, I just caught Matt Davis's— yes, I used your full name, Matt. I've called you out. The rest of the world knows. I just caught Matt's little post, and I'm not going to repeat it, but that's why I chuckled. So if you know Matt, you'll laugh as well if you can imagine what he sent me. So anyway, Jeff, take a look at that and put yourself on mute before, because you'll probably laugh as well. So you can see we've got the hashtags created. So Tweet away unless your name is Matt.

What's that?

Are you there, Jeff? Did you say something?

Yeah, one of us is having voice over IP problems, either you or me.

Okay, maybe I will slow down my talking. Maybe it might be on my end. I'll post this link out to Free Webinar Wednesdays so folks can actually take a peek. It talks about some of the Twitter growth that's going on. They are still growing and monthly users are almost 300 million now which continues to grow and revenue increases. But a lot of the questions that we get still are about, well, how do I use it effectively? How do I filter things down? How do I look for stuff? And there is a— let me just go ahead and pop back into my Twitter account here real quick. If you're using Twitter right now, one of the ways that you can measure and see kind of what's going on on your existing account, who you're connected to, and what sorts of feedback you're getting is directly within analytics. And this used to be hidden under the advertising area, But now it's actually just a link right underneath your name or your profile. So you can go in here, and if you've not been in here before, you know, set aside some time and kind of take a peek and see what sort of information is available to you. So you can see back in February, you know, I had a top tweet, and we had Joe Sullivan on us on our show and had a nice tweet there and mentioned Jeff Simpkins. A little bit of information about the .bank domain name change, some of the activity going on in March. So just gives you some really nice information about what's going on, and you can kind of navigate through and see tweets and followers and get some really good insight as to what is actually happening. One of the functions that I like quite a bit, and this is another kind of revelation that people have if they don't know that they exist is what's known as Twitter lists. And what I like about the Twitter lists is when you're actually using Twitter, it's very much a binary stream of information where you either follow somebody or you don't. And when you're following them, that information shows up in your stream and it goes over and over and over and over and over again. And if you're trying to pull out relevant and helpful information It's very difficult to kind of filter that down once you start following more than 40 or 50 people. So you can go in and actually create a list. And what I've done here is, for example, I've got a list that I'm following that has people that tweet about topics related to fitness. So you can see Mio Global, that's a watch that I use that does heart rate monitoring, Fitness Motivator, Fitness Motivator, when they retweet something, it shows up here. You can see sports quotes. This is a race organizer that I do triathlons with who recently just followed me actually. So you can get some ideas of, you know, now I don't have to look for these tweets when I go to my home and try to figure out, well, where's Meo Global if I'm looking for fitness tips? Or if I decide I want to jump in— there's Ron Cates. You remember Ron, don't you, Jeff? So I can go into my lists and I can pull that information out very quickly. I've got a list of digital marketing people and you can see— now the nice part about these lists, you can create a list and it gives you the ability to actually share that. So you can make a list and here's Ron because I've categorized him. He actually joined us last year and talked about Constant Contact and email. He's with Constant Contact.

We ran a handout together.

Yeah, yep. But the list is publicly available so if you're looking for other lists that you might want to find, so maybe you're interested in other digital marketing professionals or maybe you're in community banking or you're part of a credit union or you're interested in fitness or golden retrievers, whatever the case may be, you can actually search for lists and you can follow those lists and go in and see if there is anybody individually. So maybe Jeff sees this list and goes, huh, I'm not— you can see that there are 6 people that are subscribed to this list. So they can visit and read this. So I'm creating this list and other people can actually share it. But what Twitter recently did is you used to be able to go in and search and go to timelines and be able to find lists that way. Unfortunately, they eliminated that which caused me to kind of scurry around and figure out a way to actually update my slides so that those got changed. There's a workaround that you can use to find the lists out there but you've got to use Google. The reason that I think this has happened is also recently this month, It used to be Google had access to what was known as the Twitter firehose. So all of the tweets that Twitter was producing, and there are millions of them, were being directly fed right into Google. And then Google would index those and make them available through Google Search. And without that firehose connection, it was very difficult for Google to properly index, even though the tweets were available and they weren't being necessarily hidden. The Googlebot just didn't have the capacity to be able to keep up with all the tweets. And so a lot of that information ended up getting missed. Well, they've reconnected that. And the suspicion around the internet is Twitter wants to regain some organic visibility for its service and make it easier for people to find information and have that lead them to Twitter. And so as part of that process, what I think they've done is they've eliminated the list searching capability within Twitter itself. But if you know a couple of secret ways of actually formatting a search in Google, you can actually tell Google to specifically look for things and pull that out. And with the Firehose connected, you can see that, you know, a lot of data is here. So I'm going to go ahead and blow this up just a little bit so you can see it a little better. But when you do a Google search, if you use the site: function, that tells Google that you really want to only look in the site twitter.com. Now you can put your own website in here as well if you just want to look for your specific website and what content might exist. But in this instance, you put site:twitter.com. So hey Google, just look at Twitter. And then this inurl you put the word lists behind the colon. And that says in the actual address or the URL, we want to make sure that the word lists shows up. So if you scroll down here and you take a look, you can see that you've got twitter.com— and we'll get past the advertisements— but you've got twitter.com and then the word list shows up in the URL. And then the last component that you have is in between the brackets you put whatever phrase you're looking for. So in this example, I've just used webinars. But now I can go in here and Quora Only in Virginia has a listing of webinars that are available. And I can go in and I can see if there are any. So you can see that there's nobody that subscribed to this. You can see this one, Executive Sense, has a list that has Exec Sense webinars that might be promoting maybe their own organization. If I go back to the example and I plug in digital marketing, now you can see because I've used digital and marketing, it's pulling up both of those. So Mashable has a list on marketing services. Snark and Pepper has a list on digital marketing peeps. So any of these now I can go ahead and I can click on and I can follow. And it now gives me the ability to go and see there's 50 people that this list has that are marketing related, and there's almost 7,500 folks that have subscribed to this. And if I wanted to start following these, I could click on this subscribe and it would show in my lists. So lists are a really great way to sort down information. And if you are an organization that's focused on your community— and again, Jeff and I do a lot of work in banking— So I'll use that as an example, but if you're on Twitter, you can go out and you can find local area businesses that are in your market area. And for me, say, you know, Battle Creek area businesses or Marshall area businesses, and start compiling a list to make it really easy for people to find businesses that are doing business in the local community. And because the bank is the one that's actually producing the list, Your bank information is going to show up at the top here, your logo is going to show up, but now you can attract people and that can be the resource that you provide to folks that are interested in following other businesses and supporting the local business community. So you can kind of see how this could grow and as you filter down information and try to look for relevant information and try to figure out, well, finding stuff that's relevant, a list is a really great way of doing that. So Jeff, I'm going to pause there and see if you've got any ideas or comments. I don't know if you are using lists. I know you are not a real active Twitter user. But any insight? Or maybe if we have any questions?

Mark says, how do I see people only from my town?

Okay, so you can do a search. So for example, if I'm looking just for Battle Creek, I could go in here. Now Battle Creek, Michigan is where I live, so there just happens to be a TV show now called Battle Creek, which ironically enough is actually filmed in California, but they do have some Battle Creek references. But you can go in and, you know, you can look for your city name here. There's a couple of other services that I'll also mention that will give you some capabilities, and I've got some tools pulled up, so one of those tools might actually have that. But if you do a search, that's going to give you kind of the— if it shows up in the tweet. You can also go into an advanced search, and you can go in and you can plug in some information here. So again, just to go back real quick, if you do a search, you're going to get some options here. If you go to this advanced search over here on the left-hand side, you can go in and let's say I'm interested in maybe Mooresville, North Carolina. I can change that and I can go and see what sort of information is coming up through Mooresville. And so now I can go in and I can kind of take a peek. And these are people that are either tweeting by Mooresville or have accounts that are related to Mooresville. And as Jeff can attest, Mooresville is a pretty big NASCAR community. So you can see there's, there's no surprise that a lot of this information is related to NASCAR. Now if I go in and I take a look, we just pick on Alan for example. I can pick him up And something within his profile is triggering the fact that there's a Mooresville reference. Maybe he was in Mooresville even though it says South Florida turned North Carolina resident. So somewhere he lives in the area or he's tweeting throughout the area. That might at least give you a down and dirty way of doing it. So that's a good question. So, One of the services that I'm kind of exploring right now, and I left it for the tour so I'm hoping that it hasn't timed out on me yet, is a service called BlueNode. Jeff and I had talked about a service called LinkedIn Maps that used to do a really cool mapping function in LinkedIn of your connections and how you're connected to one another and how many connections you actually share in you know, in the LinkedIn platform. And so this blue nod is a service that you can actually connect to with your Twitter account, and it'll give you some analysis capabilities as well. So just kind of going through the little tour here, it'll give you a collection of the tweets that existed within your account. It gives you a really funky map calculation. So this looks very much— Jeff, you probably remember from the LinkedIn Maps that we used to know and love Even though LinkedIn said that they were going to be replacing it with something even newer and cooler, that hasn't happened yet, so I'm pretty bummed out. You can go through and take a peek at some of the lists where you may be appearing if somebody's added you to a list, and some profile information about people. So very similar to what LinkedIn used to do where I could click on Jeff's little head and it would show me who we share in connection with one another and what sort of activity. So This kind of gives the ability. I'm not seeing, for whatever reason, I'm not seeing the connections. But if I pick on Jeff or I talk about the financial brand quite a bit, those are all services. There's Ted Pfaff who was on our show last week. Now if I start drawing some connections, it looks like most of the people that I've got here maybe aren't exactly connected to one another. So maybe this is a bad example, but here's one brief where Ted is actually connected to Customer Lobby, which is the company that he owns. I don't know why it's showing that Ted is connected to himself, which seems a little unusual. But this is a tool that might be something kind of interesting to play around with, but just kind of shows you some of the tweets that you've got in common, and then any of the lists so you can see people that you are following. So it might be something kind of cool to take a look at. There is another service out there called MyTopTweet, and this is one that will help you identify who are your top Twitter folks. So if we just go in and maybe use Says they're flapping their wings right now, which obviously is kind of a little play on the Twitter bird. But it's going to go in and run an analysis, and I've not done this yet on my account, so this is being done for the first time here on Free Webinar Wednesday. So we'll trust that it actually works and does something kind of cool. So this goes through and you can see, well, you know, if I'm interested in finding out what kind of Twitter content that I am delivering that seems to be resonating with the folks that are following me, I can go through and take a look. So you can see, you know, back in September I posted this that talked about mobile conversions from our WSI conference. So there's a statistic there. There's another one that talks about statistics with regards to SEO. So, you know, what this would tell me is, you know, maybe the folks that I'm connected with have a propensity to be interested in statistics and other sorts of information as opposed to, you know, just kind of generic information that I'm posting and sending out through the system. So that could alter the strategy for me and maybe include a few more tweets that are related to statistics. And another one that's kind of nice to take a look at is is ManageFlitter. All of these have got free services or free versions that you can subscribe to and play around with. Before you start paying for anything, you can go ahead. This gives you the ability to see, well, of the people that you followed, and this organizes them. This is the 2,207th person that I followed, this Border Federal Credit Union in Texas. They've not followed me back because by default this These are the 951 people that I'm following that aren't following me back. So I won't be too hard on Ted because I know he's not a real avid Twitter user, but I'll certainly shoot him a note and say, hey Ted, why aren't you following me? I'm following you and you even retweeted my tweet. But I know he's very active under the Customer Lobby Twitter handle. But this can give you an idea when you start looking at engagement and reciprocity. Now there's going to be some companies out there that just aren't going to follow you back because they're big companies and you don't really necessarily expect them to. So, you know, like Slack, for example, that's a new service that we're trying out that does, you know, instant message-like communication between technical teams. They're a big organization. They may or may not really even know who I am or be worried about what I'm saying. They're following other information, but I followed them. And, but if there's people on here that you would like to get reciprocity for. Maybe you followed them and they are not following you. That gives you at least a knowledge of, hey, maybe there is a way for us to send a little reminder, or mention them in a tweet, or something along those lines. And if you want to get them to follow you and read, or have a chance of reading more of your information, you at least know who those folks are. I'm following Instagram, but Instagram is not following me. No real surprises there. So that's kind of a cool service. And then I guess a couple of other platforms that I use on a pretty regular basis, not just to manage my Twitter content, but a lot of my social content. One is called Buffer, and I believe we've talked about this in the past. But Buffer is a great little tool. It's online at bufferapp.com, and I'm actually logged in. One of the things that they're doing now as part of their services, in addition to sharing information, you can see there's a little buffer tool here. So if I went to this Google, for example, and I wanted to send this out, I can just click on the little buffer app and it gives me the ability to send this information. And I can go ahead, click on add it to my queue, and then this article will be queued up in order for me to go ahead and send that out to my social community. You can see now I've got one in my queue which is— there it is. Google is working on it. So this is going to go out later today. So the nice part about what Buffer has done, that if you are going to be active on Twitter and you are interested in sending information, they have actually taken a look at the accounts that you have connected, the conversations and the topics that you tend to be tweeting about. And they'll go and they'll find suggested content for you. So you can see here a lot of this is related to technology, how to build a better brain, probably want to read that. Sometimes what I'll do is I'll right-click and open in a new tab just to read the article first, and then if it's something that I want, I can go ahead and I can click add, and then you can see now it adds it to the queue and Now it's going to be queued out and go and be able to distribute to the rest of my social networks. The last tool, and I use this quite a bit actually, when Jeff and I— he mentioned when we were with Ron Cates at the conference in Orlando, I used HootSuite quite a bit because this gave me the ability to do a search actually for the event hashtag that CSI created. And we were able to go and find people that were actually at the conference while we were there that were talking. So if you go in and you can go into HootSuite for the free account, you can connect 3 accounts. So you can do your Facebook, your Twitter, and your LinkedIn. But now if I'm specifically looking for Twitter, I can go ahead and I can put the hashtag #TwitterFWW and I can do a search for that. And now this is saved and I can see that here are all the people that have been actually tweeting. So we can thank FS Local. We've got our friends over at Heartland Bank, Mark Patton, so some WSI folks. There's Bob giving us some advice. He's our Windows 10 guru. So now you can get some idea of who's actually following you. And if you have the HootSuite application installed on your phone, you'll be able to access this as well. So while you're attending conferences It's a great idea to create that search and have that available so you can see when people are talking about things that are going on. So I guess that kind of wraps up. I know that was just a hodgepodge of a lot of Twitter stuff that I just threw at you. I'm going to go back to the service called TweetReach. And Jeff, I don't know if— There are any other questions or comments in the chat log that you want to ask while I'm getting logged in?

None that I'm going to ask on the air.

Matt must be talking some more. TweetReach is a great little program that provides you the ability to create an account. You can see there's the big yellow button there that says you can go pro, and there's a cost involved for that. But for the free account, you can go in and you can actually have the system pull the last 50 mentions of anything. So you can use a hashtag, you can use a specific username, whatever the case may be. But a lot of times after I attend an event— and I actually did this for the CSI conference, so you can kind of see down here The last time I attended an event, I went ahead and put the actual hashtag in and it ran the report. So if we go in and we do the same thing just to measure the hashtag on Twitter and see what people are talking about, and again, this is a great way to determine who you want to engage with. Maybe there are some people out there that are tweeting about you and you didn't realize it. Maybe they're a customer of yours or they're a hot prospect, so it might be to your benefit to follow them. But if I go in here and, and I put in that Twitter FWW, you can see just within the last half an hour we've generated over 23,000 reaches, 25,000 impressions with just 9 tweets and just 8 of us over a 15-minute period. And so you can see, even though Jeff says he's not a real active tweeter, you can see he pretty much took top of the list when it came to exposure with over 10,000 impressions. Because I'm the one doing most of the talking, I'm the one that got tagged in the majority of them, so you can see what's going on there. But now you can kind of get some ideas, and over time, especially if you're at a conference or an event, this contributor list and the tweet timeline is going to get very, very big, and you'll be able to actually go back and look at this And you can click on it. So let's say I'm interested, well, you know, who is this Heartland Bank? I can go ahead and click on this and it'll take me right to the Heartland Bank account. And then from Heartland Bank, I can then decide, am I following them? Do I want to follow them? Do I want to send a conversation? Do I want to send them a message and say, hey, thanks for the great comment today on the webinar? Something about engagement, because I think that's the biggest advantage that Twitter has, is it gives you that one-on-one personal connectivity capability that I think a lot of people are missing an opportunity on. It's that conversation that you can have. So you can see here's Greg Towsley. Greg, good for you being on. Greg's been a guest of ours actually on the show before, so it's nice to see him back. This gives you a really good lowdown of what's going on. If you want, I always save these as a PDF so I've got a record of them. If you have more than 50, say you go to a big conference and there's like 200 or 300, It's like $25 and you get a transcript of everything that was talked about that TweetReach has access to. So it's really good. And even if there's an event that you can't get to but you know that that event has a hashtag, I'm going to be— and actually Jeff and I are going to be gone next week. I'm going to actually be up in Traverse City, Michigan at the Michigan Bankers Association's BEST conference. But there's going to be a hashtag for that event. But if there are bankers in Michigan that are interested in what's going on at that event, you could run a tweet reach report for the NBA hashtag and be able to see what people are talking about and get ideas. If people are posting pictures or notes or comments from presentations. So attending events even virtually is a great way of leveraging the hashtag. I was hoping I'd be able to get through most of that in 30 minutes, and it looks like I've done that. Jeff, I'll see if there's any other comments or questions. Looks like Betsy wants to live chat with me, so she wanted to know how I wanted to stop by. I'll let her just kind of sit there. I'm busy.

Nothing in the question box, and I actually am going to have to drop off. I have another appointment in just a moment. I'm going to go ahead and say my farewell to everyone. Thanks for all the information this week, Eric. I will see all of you back here in 2 weeks.

In 2 weeks, not next week.

2 weeks.

All right.

Well, with that, you all know how to get a hold of me.

Yep. Everybody knows how to get a hold of me and Jeff on Twitter now. You can go ahead and use our Twitter handles. We will not be live next week, so we will take a week off. But those of you that might be bankers in the Michigan area, if you're going to be up in Traverse City at the BEST conference, I look forward to hopefully seeing you up there. Otherwise, we'll see you the following week at freewebinarwednesdays.com. Until then, have a good week everyone. Bye-bye.