Twitter has been one of the fastest growing social media platforms and has now reached more than 140 million active users worldwide since 2006 (10 million in the UK). It’s a fantastic way of sharing information, engaging with different audiences and providing customer service.

As a business you can’t ignore the potential Twitter offers to boost brand awareness. With its 140 character limit it’s really easy to share ideas, news, information, opinions, images and videos in seconds. Good content generates interest in your products and services, and promotes interaction with your followers.

Here are 5 tips for better engagement on Twitter:

1. Tweet regularly

Sharing valuable content is the first step to growing your Twitter community. It’s your content that your followers will be interested in, so make sure what you share is helpful, fun and worthy of retweeting. Don’t limit yourself to tweeting a few times a week; tweet a few times daily.

Last week I saw a campaign by fashion chain Topshop that I thought was not only creative, but also absolutely brilliant because it managed to successfully integrate advertising, PR and social media. The campaign comes right on time for Christmas, and I just had to share it with you; I’m sure you’ll be impressed.

This year Topshop decided to run a Christmas advert for the first time ever and called the production ‘Winter Wonderland’. The fashion chain announced that the ad would feature a Hollywood celebrity, but said that they would not reveal who the ‘mystery lady’ was until the 4^th of December.

Topshop encouraged people to use the hashtag #whosthatgirl? and tweet @Topshop to guess who the star of the advertisement was with the chance to win a £500 shopping spree.

The fashion retailer shared six short videos on their YouTube channel, each one of which revealed more about the celebrity than the previous video giving clues to fans (check them out here: teaser 1, teaser 2, teaser 3, teaser 4, teaser 5, final clue).

I recently wrote about the reach changes on Facebook in the blog that I created for the PR consultancy I now work for. Because it’s an important issue for businesses I decided to share the article here as well, but I’ve added a few more details.

Have you seen a drastic decline in the reach of your Facebook posts recently? Well, don’t worry, it’s not your fault, you haven’t done anything wrong – it’s Facebook that has made some changes to the network.

A while ago I noticed a decrease in the reach for page updates. At the beginning of September other page administrators also reported that something was going wrong, however Facebook hadn’t said anything – advertisers in the States called the situation the ‘Facebook mystery of Fall 2012’.

Finally on 20 September the network announced it has made changes to its EdgeRank algorithm. The EdgeRank determines what you see in your News feed; this includes the status updates of friends, their photos as well as business pages posts.

After the change of the EdgeRank, company page updates are now for some reason seen less in the News feeds of the people who like the page and so the possibility of reaching new potential fans has also decreased. Some pages have lost 40-50% of their organic reach.

According to Facebook, the reason why they adjusted the EdgeRank was to reduce spam and make sure the News feed doesn’t turn ‘lame’, meaning people are only offered content that they are most interested in.

What is PR? A difficult question isn't it? 

For years the industry has been struggling to find a single definition that would be equally recognised by national PR bodies and organisations as well as communications academics and professionals. Head over to google and type in “definition of PR” – you’ll see about 107 thousand results! Any book you open on PR you'll find a different definition.

Even the official PR associations in various countries have adopted different definitions.

If you have a look at the ones from the two biggest PR professional bodies in the world - the US PRSA and the UK CIPR - you'll see that they differ quite a lot. 

The CIPR argues that

"Public relations is about reputation - the result of what you do, what you say and what others say about you.

Public relations is the discipline which looks after reputation, with the aim of earning understanding and support and influencing opinion and behaviour. It is the planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain goodwill and mutual understanding between an organisation and its publics."

The PRSA on the other hand has defined the practice as follows:

“Public relations is a strategic communication process that builds mutually beneficial relationships between organizations and their publics.”

As you can see, the CIPR’s definition has a strong focus on reputation, whereas the PRSA emphasises the importance of building relationships with publics. These two are indeed some of the most important aspects of PR, but I’m not sure if they individually  fully define the practice. They certainly aren’t mutually exclusive either.

The PRSA’s definition has an interesting story worth telling.

Platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are social instruments of two-way communication. This means, they offer businesses the opportunity to talk directly to their customers, but most importantly customers have the means to talk back to the company too, anytime, anywhere. And this is where the power of social media lies – in communication.

What some businesses get wrong is how social media can only serve as another advertising tool. The reality however is that broadcasting a message and simply selling don’t work anymore. As Brian Solis says: “People are searching for answers and directions, not messages or sales pitches.” It is ‘peer recommendations’ (the reviews and opinions about products and services by other people like us) that we seek on social media and that are absolutely critical to company’s marketing activities for one very simple reason: people trust friends and others like them, not organisations.

Research (see infographic by Hubspot below) shows that 75% of consumers do not even believe ads tell the truth, whereas 90% would turn to friends for brand recommendations and 71% are more likely to buy a product if someone referred to it on social media.

Here are some of the benefits and opportunities of actively engaging on social media that are worth considering: