Networking

Do mentors matter?

/ lizziechantree / 6 Comments

I have been lucky enough to have had many mentors in my life and I think they are so important when you are discovering a new field of interest. When I was inventing my first product, Runaway Spray, which is a ‘ladder’ or ‘run’ stop spray for hosiery, I had great support from business mentors from The Prince’s Trust When I wrote my first book, I discovered an international book club full of writers (RRBC) and they have been amazing in helping me to find my way in my new career, as have my fellow authors at my new publishers. I  provide mentoring myself through my networking hour on Twitter (#CreativeBizHour) and have been able to support people with new creative ideas through being a judge for Shell LiveWire’s Grand Ideas Award, and having a Facebook group where I share creative ideas with fellow artists/designers/ businesses/writers (Lizzie’s Book Group)

If you are starting a new career, or looking to push forward with your current job or hobby, then you might be surprised to find out how many people and organisations there are out there to offer unbiased help and support. Facebook and Twitter are full of networking hours and groups, you just have to search for them in the search bar and then join. With these groups, it’s good to join in and support others too. It’s about teamwork. When you have found a mentor and learnt what you need to, perhaps you can in turn become a mentor for someone else and help them on their own journey?

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In your opinion, do mentors matter and has one helped you in your life? It will be exciting to hear if anyone else has been nurtured and helped to blossom into the person they have always wanted to be.

Growing your Twitter followers.

/ lizziechantree / 2 Comments

Happy new week everyone! Today I thought I’d stay with the theme of Twitter, as I am often asked about how I get followers on my Twitter account @Lizzie_Chantree There is no trick, but I am happy to share some ideas I use.

 

  1. Have interesting content on your Twitter timeline. Why should people follow your Twitter account? What would interest them?
  2.  Does your Twitter timeline represent your personality? I write romance books and am interested in creativity and people in general, so I often tweet about lifestyle, families, design. business, and romance. I also like to chat to people on Twitter. I think it’s a great networking tool and you can reach out to contact people you might not be able to otherwise. It would be a bit confusing if I suddenly began posting random pictures of cars or elephants.
  3. Make your bio interesting. The first thing people who visit your page see, is your profile picture and bio. What do they say about you? I very rarely follow anyone without a bio photo or description. I assume they are not really interested in their account.
  4. Follow a few more people each week, then unfollow any that don’t follow you back after a couple of weeks. They might not be interested in your Timeline, or are not active enough on Twitter to respond to your follow  with a follow back. You can use programmes like Manageflitter for this, or CommunIT.
  5. Interact with people. I chat to different people every day and really enjoy networking. People are more likely to follow an active Twitter user as there are many programmes out there that will tell you if a Twitter account hasn’t tweeted for the last year, month, day few hours.
  6. Respond to your notifications! If someone is tweeting to you, take a moment to reply. You might be busy, but it takes seconds to respond with a thank you if someone has retweeted you.

 

Ninja School Mum Book Link

Pinned Tweets.

/ lizziechantree / 7 Comments

Happy new week! After the fun and excitement of my first book launch and solo blog tour, I am now getting back to sharing marketing and writing news each week. I will share things I’ve learnt on my journey so far with my latest book, Ninja School Mum.

NSM tweets

 

This week’s post is about Twitter and pinned posts. I really enjoy interacting with people on Twitter, but unless you are actually chatting and networking there, it’s probably a bit of a waste of your time. I have noticed lately that a lot of people leave a pinned tweet for a long time. A pinned tweet, is the first tweet you see when you open someone else’s page on Twitter. There is an option to ‘pin’ any of your own original tweets to the top of your profile page.

Many think that if you leave this pinned tweet, then it collects retweets and the numbers of RT’s look good if they are high. The problem with this, is that if someone like me, (who often visits the pages of my Twitter followers and likes to Rt their work), has to scroll through lots of tweets to find one about their work, I give up and move on. I can RT the pinned tweet, but if I have already done this, I can’t do it again. This is such a wasted opportunity. I always update my pinned tweet at least once a week, but often every few days or hours. That way, anyone visiting my Twitter page has fresh content at the top of my page, that they don’t have to page down or waste their time looking for. Everyone has busy schedules and this saves them time and makes the opportunity of a new RT more possible for me.

Check out some Twitter feeds you know and see if you agree.

 

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