Thursday 16 August 2012

Marketing Part 1 - Twitter

This is a tough one, I joined twitter about a year ago and did 2 tweets and then left it well alone. About 6 months ago I started to use Twitter again both for Beam Calcs and Steel Beam Calculator. For both accounts I have done in excess of 300 tweets some were inane tweets about what’s for dinner and others were tweets about the business, there have been plenty of links to both websites.

In all the hours I have spent on twitter I think I have got possibly £120 worth of work, which frankly speaking is a piss poor performance.

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/realworld/374548/is-twitter-bad-for-business

This is an excellent article about twitter; it mentions how twitter has a pathetically low click through rate and an even smaller conversion percentage. My favourite quote from the article is;

“Twitter is for social interaction and using it to sell feels as intrusive and unwelcoming as hawking roses in a pub"

The author details how watching your account gain followers can inflate your ego, well what happens when some of these followers turn nasty. We all remember the case of Tom Daley at the Olympics, where a young man gained notoriety by insulting Tom after his dive. What did he gain from this? – Well about 100,000 followers. Would he have said these insults to Tom’s face? All of these faceless people hide behind the anonymity of the internet.

I have had my fair share of snide comments on twitter, nothing on par with Tom, people putting snide comments about online businesses. Another thing on twitter is the idea of over analysing everything, 140 characters can lead to a lot of different interpretations.

My motto with twitter is don’t type anything that you would not actually say to someone face to face. It’s only the internet, these people are not your friends, and you won’t have even met 98% of them.

Remember the telephone or talking face to face is actually called SOCIALISING!

Saturday 11 August 2012

My Business Timeline

This is a time line of my entrepreneurial journey so far, I made some good decisions along the way as well as some bad ones. The most important lesson I learnt is that a business should be planned around the business owners personal objectives and that the business should serve the business owner and not the other way round.

2008 January - Beam Calcs Ltd founded

2009 August - Instant Calculations Web App www.beamcalcs.com

2010 November - Steel Beam Calculator Ltd founded

2011 January - Steel Beam Calculator UK Web App www.steelbeamcalculator.co.uk

2011 November - Steel Beam Calculator US Web App www.steelbeamcalculator.com

2012 June - Steel Beam Calculator UK iPhone App http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/steel-beam-calculator-uk

2012 August - Steel Beam calculator EU Web App www.steelbeamcalculator.eu