Twitter: Social Networking

A few weeks back, I decided to take part in some social media networking to not only help promote this Blog, but also my freelance project, Neopog Designs.

Now, I've been on Twitter for a couple of years now, but it's only recently that I've started using it more regularly. It's a great starting point for gaining more followers to promote your work to.

I started off joining in on a thing called "Follow Friday" which is a bit like a little game where Twitter users tweet a list of anyone they would like to recommend for others to follow by simply adding #followfriday or #ff so the tweet could look something like this:

Happy #FollowFriday @Neopog #ff

The hashtag is important as this allows twitter to recognise a searched subject. So if you went to the search box on there and typed #followfriday you will see a full list of suggestions.

Leading on from that, I discovered there where similar trends such as #followbus and #followladder but the most beneficial one to me was one called #speednetworking which I came across from being a follower of thisladyloves.com.

In case you're not familiar with thisladyloves.com, their aim is to help businesses grow, by promoting, referring and bringing together businesses and ladies around the UK. They run business networking events across the North West area as well as speed networking on Twitter which takes place every Saturday from 6pm until 7pm. The #Speed Networking is not just about getting more followers but about using the time to do business.

How do you take part?

Follow @thisladyloves on Twitter

Tune in ready to start at 6pm every Saturday

Feel free to tweet before 6pm that you are taking part in #speednetworking with @thisladyloves at 6pm

Tweet to @thisladyloves with your business info or promotion between 6pm – 7pm

They will retweet a selection but only if the full sentence #speednetworking with @thisladyloves is included in the tweet, and you must be following them

Each business taking part must retweet a minimum of 10 tweets that have the sentence #speednetworking with @thisladyloves included

Don’t forget to follow any business you retweet and any business who retweets your tweet

You will soon start linking with other businesses

What did I get out of it?

Well, first of all I tweeted:

Think I'll do a bit of @thisladyloves #speednetworking now and hopefully get some more Blog #followers

Followed by:

#Blogger #Freelance #GraphicsDesign #Digital #Artist #Illustrator #Wrexham #speednetworking @thisladyloves

Then I done my 10 retweets with one of them being this from the children's charity Claire House:

#speednetworking @thisladyloves we are looking for support in designing event posters in lieu of name on marketing material.

I thought great, this is perfect for helping me build on my portfolio! So I tweeted back this:

@ClaireHouse I may be able to help with some poster designs.

We exchanged emails and set up a face to face meeting to discuss the requirements and here is my first event poster designed for them.