I’ve noticed that junior mining companies have begun to discover Twitter, as more and more of them have popped up on my follow list recently. So guys, here’s why you’re failing miserably at this new way of getting your message across.
1) You never engage with your audience and you are boring as hell. Most of you think setting that up a Twitter account is just another way of getting your news releases disseminated.
2) You think it’s a privilege for us to follow you. It’s like, “Oh, we’re “XYZ.v and look everyone, we’ve arrived! Please form an orderly queue.” Do you honestly think that I want to read NRs for pleasure, not just work?
3) Please return immediately to the 20th century. Even though it’s not rocket science 95% of you don’t understand Twitter, so go back to your comfort zones and stop bothering us (your potential new shareholders).
Therefore as a public service IKN is going to explain to you IR neanderthals how you can make Twitter work for you and, most importantly, gain both a big advantage on your competitors (cos let’s face it, there are thousands of you out there trying to peddle your moose pastures and get people’s attention) as well as build a good sized audience of loyal followers who might just turn into loyal shareholders one of these days (hey you never know). And it’s not that difficult, because you can boil it down to one word:
Engage
Twitter is a social medium, with the emphasis on social. This means you have to be just that….y’know, for once in your lives you’re going to have to pretend you give a damn about your shareholders, instead of the normal hackneyed “oh b-b-b-but our shareholders are our greatest priority” bullshit lip-service that comes straight out of IR101 handbook but is rarely if ever backed up by even the slightest amount of sincerity. So you have to be a person, not a corporation. When I as a Twitter user am on the site and looking at my stream, apart from the direct news services I choose to follow (BBC News, WSJ, La Nacion Argentina, Reuters etc etc) I like to think that there’s a person on the other end. So START a conversation, don’t wait for it to happen. Twitter is a quid-pro-quo situation and not a one-way stream so let’s be clear here, if you are not interesting enough people will not follow you and anything you write on Twitter will be read by nobody. Your job is to gain followers, not think that just the act of you following me will oblige me to follow you.
IT DOESN’T WORK LIKE THIS:
1) You follow me
2) I get a message through from Twitter along the lines of “Moose Pasture Ltd (XYZ.v) is now following you on Twitter.”
3) I click on their Twitter name and check out what they’ve been writing recently. It’s either empty (i.e. they’ve never used Twitter to say a single thing) or it’s wall-to-wall NR links with zero human input
4) My eyes roll, I think “another boring fart jr miner, I’m not following back“
5) From that moment, anything you write in the future will never be read by me. Ever.
THE ABOVE HAPPENS 95% OF THE TIME WHEN I SEE A CORPORATE ACCOUNT FOLLOW ME. HOWEVER, IT DOES WORK LIKE THIS BELOW AROUND 5% OF THE TIME:
1) You follow me
2) I get a message through from Twitter along the lines of “Moose Pasture Ltd (XYZ.v) is now following you on Twitter.”
3) I click on their Twitter name and check out what they’ve been writing recently. To my surprise it’s an account being run by a real human being that makes an effort. Yes, there are NR links and company promo material, but that’s ok because they’re interspersed with comments about things you’ve been read on Twitter or the web, answers and exchanges between you and other people, perhaps re-tweets of things you liked and want to share with others. Some of your “real tweets” are about your company, some are about the sector in which you operate (e.g. thoughts on the price of silver, a recent political development, whatever), some are you answering questions from shareholders or potential shareholder, some are even you having a friendly off-topic or semi off topic conversation with another person
4) My eyes open wide, I think, “Hey, a junior mining twitter acccount that’s actually worth following for a change” and I follow you back.
5) From that moment, what you write in the future will be read by me.
Yes, you can promote your company but not all the time. Yes please, feel free to offer up the latest news release, a link to the new corporate presentation, the occasional reminder of the qualities of your exploration deposit, your stellar quarterly results a few weeks later etc etc. But the story about Twitter is that you have to engage, put in a bit of effort (yeah, sorry about cutting into that three martini lunch you had planned you lazy dumbass waste of space far too used to the cushy life you’ve dug out for yourself) talk to people and use Twitter as a way of attracting people to you, not a way of sending out information to them.
And really, that’s about it. Be interesting and people will be interested. Be boring and we’ll never care about you, your company or what you’ve been doing recently, but we will care about your competitor and read his stuff because he understood Twitter before you did.
UPDATE: IKN recommends the comments left by Iwnattos below this post and also below the Quinton/Cambone post as good reading material on the subject, too.