Next week, 2015.12.10, my first internship in the United States will end. Although this job is on the client side and there is no one who can really lead or guide me, I have room to develop in SEO and Twitter, and I have made a lot of progress in one semester. This experience also helped me a lot when applying for inSegment. inSegment is the only Digital Marketing Agency in Boston that I can find that has a comprehensive internship program. It is also the company I want to work for next semester! During the interview process, the other party was very interested in what I was doing related to SEO and asked a lot of questions. In the end, he seemed very satisfied with my answer and made an offer on the spot. While you still remember some things at work, quickly write it into an article. If you continue on this path and become an expert in the future, you can look back and laugh at the things you have done~
NGIN Workplace
I’ll skip the details about how to find this company, the interview process, etc. This company is a Coworking Space. This concept doesn’t seem to be very popular in Taiwan. Simply put, it means renting out a working space to start-ups, remote workers, small companies, etc., to individuals or groups who don’t have the budget or are not big enough to rent out an entire office. The advantage is that it can save a lot of troubles, such as signing contracts, water and electricity, Wifi, decoration... and so on.
NGIN takes a high-end route, with spacious space. The chairs, tables, rest areas, and conference rooms inside are all very designed. The refrigerator or restaurant table will be filled with yogurt, soda, milk, fruit, and snacks. It is really a good choice for the target group. You can have a good office environment for a little money.
Of course, it’s even better for me as an intern. I can slip in and do my own thing during the holidays without spending any money. I can find food and drinks inside. But the best thing is that I can be under one roof with a bunch of extremely powerful and thoughtful people. Because the company is in Cambridge, Boston, close to Harvard and MIT, there are often some powerful people hanging around. Chatting with these people and listening to their stories will make me very motivated to work hard.
Digital Marketing Intern
In this position, my boss originally asked me to manage the company's Twitter. I have mentioned SEO and PPC, but after all, one is related to the website and the other is related to money. They don't trust a little intern to touch it, so Twitter and other chores have become my main work content. For the SEO part, I will look at the areas where the website can be improved, make a report and give it to the boss, add link building, and contact some reporters or bloggers to see if there are any opportunities to increase backlinks.
Managing Twitter is interesting and challenging, because firstly, I am not that familiar with it, and secondly, followers on Twitter come and go quickly. If you post too frequently or are too boring, people will unfollow you. I also use Twitter personally, and the page will be washed out very quickly, so if I see Tweets that have nothing to do with me, or if I see an account that I have forgotten why I follow it and often posts things that interest me, I will immediately want to unfollow him.
Facebook doesn't have this problem. If fans find your content boring, they usually won't click on it. If they don't click on it, they won't like it. If there is no interaction, fewer and fewer people will appear on the graffiti wall, so the number of people won't rise and fall as dramatically as on Twitter.
During my internship (09/14-12/10), the number of Followers increased from 834 to 950. Although it did not increase by a lot, it fortunately did not decrease. I will record some of my experience in operating Twitter~
![Illustration for American internship experience (1): Managing Twitter]()
![Illustration for American internship experience (1): Managing Twitter]()
![Illustration for American internship experience (1): Managing Twitter]()
![Illustration for American internship experience (1): Managing Twitter]()
![Illustration for American internship experience (1): Managing Twitter]()
![Illustration for American internship experience (1): Managing Twitter]()
![Illustration for American internship experience (1): Managing Twitter]()
myoficio is one of our opponents. This tweet means that the opponent wants to visit their store. At this time, I will jump into the conversation and ask the opponent if he wants to come to our store and give him a free day pass or something like that. Of course, if you reply to anyone, remember to delete @myoficio, otherwise the opponent will also receive a notification...
![Illustration for American internship experience (1): Managing Twitter]()
I felt guilty doing this at first, but after successfully attracting several customers, I gradually got used to it.
![Illustration for American internship experience (1): Managing Twitter]()
1. Twitter account
I didn't think of taking a screenshot of the picture before the change, so I can't make a comparison picture. However, I suggest that the boss can put a photo with a more interesting theme. The original one is a bit ugly.
Next is the Bio part, which is limited to 156 characters. The original introduction also included the address, which is a bit redundant, because you can tell where you are next.
I also added Pinned Tweet, which is somewhat similar to the concept of top posts, so that people who don’t know NGIN and are still confused after reading the introduction have another place to learn about it.
Finally, there is the background image. The background image needs to be set additionally. In the upper right corner, go to User->Settings->Design->Customize your own->Change background. Here you can put an extra photo of yourself or get more creative. If there is no special setting, the background will be a single color.
2. Share pictures on Instagram
In the past, if the boss posted a new photo on Instagram, he would click on it and share it on Twitter. However, since these two companies are different, if you share it directly, only one link will appear. People on Twitter scroll very quickly and will not particularly want to click on the link to jump to other web pages.
So I suggested to my boss to use IFTTT, a tool I had recommended before. After linking the two accounts, posting an IG picture will automatically send a Twitter message, and the picture will still be displayed.
Of course, you still have to be careful that the word count cannot exceed 140 characters, otherwise it will be cut off.
![Illustration for American internship experience (1): Managing Twitter]()
3. Be careful when using "@" at the front
"@" is used to tag other people. The tagged person will receive a notification, but be careful. If the beginning of a Tweet is "@", then the tweet will not appear on other people's news feeds.
Tweets like the one above will only be seen by @lighterculture, or unless someone specifically clicks into your account to view Tweets&Replies.
![Illustration for American internship experience (1): Managing Twitter]()
This actually makes sense when you think about it. Otherwise, if accounts with tens of thousands of followers interacted with their fans on Twitter, they would go crazy and wash their pages. This is why you sometimes see ".@ABCDE" at the beginning of some Tweets. Adding an extra dot at the beginning will cause the post to appear on all followers' graffiti walls.
![Illustration for American internship experience (1): Managing Twitter]()
This actually makes sense when you think about it. Otherwise, if accounts with tens of thousands of followers interacted with their fans on Twitter, they would go crazy and wash their pages. This is why you sometimes see ".@ABCDE" at the beginning of some Tweets. Adding an extra dot at the beginning will cause the post to appear on all followers' graffiti walls.
4. Make good use of Tweetdeck, Hootsuite... and other assistance tools
Each of these tools has its own advantages and disadvantages. I have personally used them all, but the one I am most familiar with is Tweetdeck. They are basically the same. The same functions are schedule and supervision. Before I took over, I ran a platform to see when my posts would be seen by the most people, and then I could decide when to send out the Tweets based on these peak periods of people tweeting.
Monitoring the big and small things happening on Twitter is another super practical use. For example, NGIN is a coworking space in Boston. One of the things I monitor is "coworking, boston", so that as long as any tweet contains these two words, it will appear in that box. I created several columns, including those for competitors, local Boston media, related to entrepreneurs or startups...etc., to see if there is anything that can be put to good use.
5. Steal customers
This is my favorite part, and it is one of the things I use tweetdeck to do. One of the things I monitor is the accounts of each opponent, to see what activities the other party holds, which merchants they cooperate with, what they say... Finally, are there any customers who are looking for coworking space.
myoficio is one of our opponents. This tweet means that the opponent wants to visit their store. At this time, I will jump into the conversation and ask the opponent if he wants to come to our store and give him a free day pass or something like that. Of course, if you reply to anyone, remember to delete @myoficio, otherwise the opponent will also receive a notification...
I felt guilty doing this at first, but after successfully attracting several customers, I gradually got used to it.
5. Who is unfollowing me?
As mentioned at the beginning, if the content on Twitter is boring, it will be easily unfollowed. Sometimes it will be very frustrating to lose 3 or 4 followers for no reason over the weekend. At this time, I will useunfollowers.comLet’s see who are the people who unfollowed me.
Some people on Twitter will first follow a bunch of accounts in order to get others' attention. The followed people will receive notifications and sometimes "follow back", which is a bit like mutual likes on Facebook, competing for each other's popularity.
So you can use this tool to see who is unfollowing you. If the unfollowers are all people who have a lot of followers and a lot of following, then it is probably the above situation, and you don’t have to blame yourself for your poor performance~
6. Following/Followers ratio
A healthy Twitter account should have many people following it, but it follows very few people. If the number of followers and followers is tens of thousands like the one above, it looks super "spammy". The boss didn't know how to make this ratio greater than 1 (we follow more people than people who follow us), so I also continue to unfollow some people.
Another useful feature of the website mentioned in point 5 above is that you can check the accounts you follow to see which ones have not been on Twitter for several months and unfollow them all. In fact, I personally think that 80% can be deleted, otherwise NGIN now has more than 1,400 people following it, and they would not read the Dynamic Times at all.
7. Find events on Twitter
Many companies have some good activities on Twitter to increase exposure. Redbull is one of them. The company can use the hashtag #OfficeMVP to tweet to @redbull and tell them who your office MVP is, and Redbull will reply to you with a very interesting picture.
Workbar is another opponent of ours. Note that there is a period before his reply, so all redbull’s followers will see this tweet, which will bring a lot of exposure to the company. I don’t know why my boss doesn’t like this idea, so I haven’t tried this hashtag yet. However, I have used another hashtag from Redbull: #WingsatWork. Redbull’s slogan is “Red bull gives you wings!”, and this hashtag is to ask their people to come to your office to distribute Red Bull drinks and give everyone energy (Wings)..@Workbar Well done, @shawnhesse & @Get__Bent! ??? #OfficeMVP https://t.co/C3MmYoGIYb pic.twitter.com/4ecr13gFNF— Red Bull (@redbull) November 20, 2015
I didn’t have high expectations when I contacted them, but they actually came a month later! And they came without warning, so I didn’t have a chance to let the boss know about it, but she felt very satisfied afterward, because many of our guests felt surprised, and the event was quite a success.
![Illustration for American internship experience (1): Managing Twitter]()
![Illustration for American internship experience (1): Managing Twitter]()
Conclusion:
It seems a bit too long to focus on Twitter and SEO in the same article, so I’ll leave the SEO part for the next article. After managing Twitter this semester, I feel that it is a platform that is no less important to businesses than Facebook. I hope that Twitter will become popular in Taiwan in the future, so that this experience of mine can be even more useful!
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