I recently inherited a few twitter accounts with well over 3000 followers each that were following almost as many twitter feeds. Unfortunately the quality of these followers and those we were following were not that great. A significant number of them wouldn’t typically be interested in what we were posting and we certainly didn’t want to see “$50 FREE SLOT PLAY” every few minutes in our feeds. For our feed to be valuable to us, we need to know our audience so that we can communicate things that are valuable to them. You have to get to know the users the community will potentially serve.
Choose your customers. Fire the ones that hurt your ability to deliver the right story to the others. – Seth Godin: What do you know?
Start by gathering information. If you can, have person interviews. Ask what your users need? Do they have problems? Where do they hang out online and how do they participate? What are their likes and dislikes in those communities? Who are the most important people in the community?
Leverage this listening data and make changes. From there, keep two questions in mind. “What are we doing wrong?” and “What are we doing that we can we do better?”.
