Drake Music’s relationship manager, Helen Mahoney, has started using Twitter as a part of her work building up relationships with potential advocates and funders. This is one of our social media experiments and you can read more about it here.
I caught up with Helen to see how thing are progressing. We are only a month on from the start of the experiment, so it is still early days, and Helen has been using a Twitter list of potential advocates to get a feel for what people are talking about. The list is a mix of people, from music makers to pop stars.
Helen says that not all tweets are from the person (pop stars use PR people, for example) and many people retweet other people’s tweets rather than tweet their own stuff. So, with limited time, you need to be able to get to the most relevant content. That means who you follow really matters – if they tweet endless content that is of no use then it can be hard to find the stuff that matters.
This seems to be the main learning point so far: be clear why you are following people and keep filtering who you follow, especially if they are sharing things that aren’t relevant. That said, Helen says you need to go through the process of following people to understand what they share and what interests them.
“It’s interesting to see the different ways that people are using Twitter, this is something that I hadn’t really appreciated before. Focusing on what’s potentially useful in amongst the deluge of tweets is key I think. Tools such as HootSuite help to organise the flow of information, but there is a certain amount of trial and error involved in deciding who to follow and who to engage with.”
Helen will be tweaking her list and adding new people to follow and we’ll check in over the coming weeks to see how things are progressing.
