Team Locals

The 20th of June saw our very own Team Locals contributor Sean Boon host his first talk for small businesses about how to maximise their twitter use to gain customers and build relationships in the local community.

Sean Boon has many strings to his bow it seems, magician, app king and business trainer.

It’s fair to say in his own admission at #twittertalk that he’s a bit of a geek.

But a geek in the good sense, he knows his way around technology that’s for sure as the audience at TwitterTalk discovered.

Sean made sure that he used social media as his main method of advertising Twittertalk and stated at the beginning of the evening that he only had 5 posters made, as an experiment to see if it had any impact on attendee numbers.

With only 3 people in a packed room which became standing room only raising their hands to say they had attended due to hearing about the event from another means other than social media the test had proved this point. Social media marketing can work for businesses!

Sean began the talk with a brief history of himself and why he decided to hold a night like this for small businesses. Thanking @manic_sp, Manic Stage productions, Nicole Geddes for the inspiration following her feedback from interviewing Sean for her dissertation.

We then covered the basics of Twitter, what an ‘#ff’ is and what the usage of the ‘@’ sign in a tweet might mean amongst other things.

Sean disclosed the variety of ways of constructing a tweet and who would see each tweet depending on how it was constructed.

A relaxed atmosphere provided an open forum for questions to be asked throughout the evening.

After seeing the best methods for constructing a tweet for maximum impact and using them to generate more followers we had a short break.

After the interval, Sean then began to explain how it is worthwhile looking at your twitter statistics for seeing who your most influential followers are as well as monitoring your follower growth and even seeing when to tweet as well as demonstrating to us that even though your twitter account may reflect your business, you may find that your tweets aren’t actually showing what your business message is. Meaning that you really need to think before you tweet if you are using your account just for your business.

An evening where I think everyone learnt something.  Admittedly some of the information did fly over our heads. But I can see us using Sean in the future to consult about how best to use Twitter and we weren’t the only ones that night to mention that we would happily ask Sean to take a look at how we operate social media marketing.

This evening beat a lot of networking and social media talks that charge big bucks hands down in our opinion. A totally free event where Sean made it clear that if you wanted to provide a donation then that would be gratefully received. Purely option but I hope people did contribute as the value of the talk was so great for a free night and for the knowledge that Sean passed on.

If you want to follow sean you can on @sean_boon and watch out for tweets about the next #twittertalk I’m sure after the success of this one that there will be another……watch this space!