October 25, 2013Conrad (The Wine Wankers)

Follow us on Twitter (and like us on Facebook) !!!

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Conrad and Stu sharing wine and having a laugh in the Blue Mountains

Some of you have probably already noticed that we now have a Twitter handle, @winewankers, and that it is appearing as a feed on our home page as well as tweets appearing on our Facebook page.

For some time now a huge and active fan of ours has been trying to convince us to set up a twitter account, with comments of encouragement on our Facebook page and my Conrad page.  We just weren’t convinced of its value and were concerned it would just be another media sucking up our precious time.  We needed a good reason to sign up.

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Neal enjoying his wine being poured by Conrad

Neal left for a trip to South America late last week and decided to set up our Twitter account in the hope of making good use of it while he was away.  Sadly, his wife has him on a social media blackout, which is fair enough I suppose, he is on holidays after all.  He has pulled those curtains aside slightly a couple of times to send test tweets and I am hoping he might be able to sneak out a couple more before he gets home because he is on a spectacular trip drinking special wine.

So what will you see if you follow us on Twitter?  The idea is that we can send quick tweets in the midst of our wine experiences.  We’re going to set things up so that our new blog posts send a tweet out too (as a kind of notification method).  And we will send a few of our tweets across to Facebook (once we all get Selective Tweets set up, but until then, our Facebook followers will be “lucky” enough to get all our tweets – yay!!).

If any of you have any good ideas on how to effectively use Twitter (and in combo with our Facebook page and our blog) we’d love to hear from you.  To be honest, right now, we aren’t all that convinced.  We’ve all given it a go but can’t see why we can’t just post the same content on our Facebook page.  And we’re concerned that Twitter has a spamming feel to it.  The last thing we want to do is turn people off by overload.  We enjoy what we’re doing here but would hate to piss people off.

And I have a confession to make.  Until Stu convinced me to start this blog with him exactly 3 months ago I wasn’t much into social media at all.  I don’t even have a Facebook account but I do fear that this blog is sucking me into the sphere.  My passion for wine is outweighing my passion against social media unfortunately.  I still don’t get it though, and we’re all going to need some further convincing of the value of Twitter.  We don’t need any more time wasters.

So here’s how we see our 3 avenues coming together …

– Twitter will be for quick updates at the point in time, like, “Check out this awesome wine I just had at whatever location” or “look at Stu passed out!!!!”.  We’ll send some of these across to our Facebook page.  (I didn’t even convince myself with that one, but lets give it a go shall we)

– Facebook will be our general notice board, the intermediary if you will.  Those already following us on Facebook would have seen that almost half our content now is directly posted on our Facebook page and not from our blog.  Content directly posted on Facebook will usually be a bit more in-depth than Twitter but far smaller than our blog posts.

– Our blog will continue to be our outlet for us to more deeply express our wine related experiences.  Those following us for a while now would know that our style is not so much about detailing the wine itself, enough people do that already, it’s about the stories.  To read how our blog came about please click here!

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Conrad and Neal with James Halliday

Now you can all help us out by following us on Twitter @winewankers.  If you have a Twitter account please go to our home page and click on the Follow button within our Twitter feed.  We currently only have TWO followers, one being Andy (yeah, thanks mate, I think) and the other being Stu’s dutiful wife (and my sister).  Clearly a more important medium than our Facebook page with about 150 likes and our blog with about 800 bloggers who follower us (with about 10 new ones each day… Twitter has a lot to live up to).    🙂

Also, please follow us and like us on Facebook (Geez I am really turning into a begging social media wh073).  You can also access our Facebook page from our home page.

I look forward to engaging with your all within our expanding social media empire (I think).

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100 comments

  4. Am exhausted reading about all of your ideas to increase your social media exposure. I have a link to Twitter, but honestly I limit myself to two posts a week as it takes over my life. Also I’m too lazy. But good luck to all of you!!!!!

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  5. Not sold on Twitter yet, but it seems good for ‘as it happens events’…. We can share pictures of us at the start of a wine tasting evening in Sydney, followed by video clips of us in our classic heated discussions with people on twitter wading into the conversation to help clear up issues… followed by picture of you dancing on a table and Neal stumbling past the Opera House… I can see how twitter could be bring allot of laughs to our wine adventure! Can we do simultaneous global wine tastings on twitter?

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  6. Facebook has been a nightmare for me – there’s a glitch that doesn’t give me the full page and I can’t connect or even search for anyone else’s page either. Worse, I have repeatedly requested help from them and not had a single answer. So there it sits, a waste of time.

    Twitter on the other hand was easy to set up, and when I did have a problem, it was fixed immediately.

    I’ve linked twitter to my blog after reading the “how to” on WordPress (only, when you get to the cut-and-paste part inside twitter you only need the number – that stuffed me around for a bit). So now whenever I blog, the title of the post is automatically “twittered” (or whatever the right words is). I don’t “use it” as such.

    That’s the full extent of it for me.

    Hey, and I don’t even have a mobile phone. 🙂

    Good luck with it!

    P.S. I’m pleased you are still there and your house didn’t burn down.

    Cheers to you! 🙂

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  8. I currently add 100 followers a day or so, and drive traffic to my blog. This is part time, with a dayjob, and not trying to monetize my blog as a goal. Just sharing some humor.

    Even for fun, it’s great to connect with people, as it’s an avenue to meet new cool people. I met Steve Boylan and @nahdude83 on Twitter for example, I now include them on my blog in the Where in the World is Steve Boylan Episodes. @nahdude (I know his real name, but it’s not public) lives 4 hours south of me, and Steve is in Ireland.

    By tweeting to those hashtags (#wine, #winewednesdays) for example you can draw traffic to your blog.

    You don’t have to post pics of you drunk, joke around or be anything other than yourselves. But it’s nice to have you, and when I talk about you, there’s a Twitter account to provide, instead of a blog link.

    So you can do serious tweets in your own writing style (and for Conrad that is pretty funny anyway) in 140 characters and recommend a great wine, etc.

    How you use it is up to you of course.

    Personally I improv a lot and DJ some music to #radiofreefresno and tell whatever joke I think up at the moment. I don’t use a draft folder, it’s all done on the fly.

    Any questions, I or @koustave Don’tCribb here (also @organicsocial is his company handle) will help.

    I do it free, @koustave is actually a pro and has helped me. Probably ask me so we don’t lean on the guy who gets paid to answer the questions to much. If I don’t know I will just ask him anyway.

    Remember to stay away from the fires. Don’t be a hero and try to save the wine. Someone like me will be along to help clean up after, and I trust you will get a fair shake. If not, you can lean on me here to see what up with that. #InsuranceAdjuster4Life!

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  9. Across my 6 twitter accounts, I have about 2k followers now, more than the 1200 on the blog btw.

    I consider the blog homebase. And drive traffic to it off twitter, but I have fun on twitter with jokes and what not.

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      • Yeah, stay apolitical and non watchdog if you want to not have 6 accounts. Exposing racists, haters and potentially fake charities has me in trouble with the twitter police.

        Amazingly the porn and racists have a free playground. But blogging about them and documenting it lands you in trouble.

        C’est la vie. I’m the worlds most stubborn man. haha. 😉

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  10. congrats on the new social media venues 🙂 I went into my deLizious facebook page kicking and screaming, but have enjoyed very much. Hope you do yours as well. Off to like!

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  11. Now fix your settings so your Twitter share button says @winewankers instead of @wordpress after “via”. I edited it, but some people won’t. It’s under Blog Admin ~ Settings ~ Sharing down at the bottom. Enter your Twitter handle.

    My blog posts all share automatically to Facebook, Twitter, Google +, Tumbler & Linked In. You can edit the hashtags in the share setting section as your write a post. It all fires off at once from the blog, very handy dandy.

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  12. I dont use those other two, but if I ever do I will follow you. Its a good idea to try, if it doesnt work out you can change it anyway.
    “The last thing we want to do is turn people off by overload”. I do it all the time, if you want to see the results, you can take me as an experiment example 😛
    “Our style is not so much about detailing the wine itself, enough people do that already, it’s about the stories.” That sounded so cute 🙂

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  13. This is the value of Twitter as I see it.

    Twitter has 218 million members. Many more than WordPress. Have you ever played 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon? Well, here’s an ideal tweet that a fellow WordPress blogger published off her blog to twitter.

    http://s1288.photobucket.com/user/KaufmansKavalkade/media/IdealBlogpublishtotwitter_zpsa1e990e8.jpg.html

    As you can see, she lists the title, the category hashtag #poetry #photography and the link.

    By using the hashtag, that gives a landing page on twitter. Anyone can go to that hashtag and see her posts, it’s a solid place. Not just bouncing around the void of twitter. So that audience is potentially exposed to her link and blog.

    She is in my list “WordPress Bloggers”. I have every wordpress blogger I follow on twitter in that list. I can zoom down that list and retweet and favorite anything appealing to me.

    As you can see, I have favorited and retweeted her post (the 2 icons in upper right of tweet) This means her reach has been extended to my 730 or so followers. How many will visit her blog? I don’t know.

    On my blog, I have large and small twitter accounts as followers. And some famous people. I’m not particularly enamored by the famous people, but don’t tell Dana Carvey that please. 😉 FYI, I went to performing arts school with now famous people, so I’m kinda used to them. So that’s why.

    Anyway, if an account with 500k followers likes your stuff, and tweets it, that’s you reaching 500k more people, who now know you and your blog exist. An uncertain percentage will be curious and come have a looksee. Of that an uncertain percentage will read your stuff and perhaps register here or email follow.

    The more they see you in twitter, the more curious they will be to check you out, if you are writing about subject matter that appeals to them. I go heavy on humor and personality myself, but that’s not everyones approach or ability.

    I have talked with famous people, and their followers see you talking to them in their TL. The curious will check you out and follow. Like I said, I gain over 100 followers a day now on Twitter.

    Once you send out a tweet, you have no idea of whose hands it will end up in, and who will be attracted as a follower. So yeah, it has value to drive people to your blog. The good writing and converting them to followers here is up to you, Mate.

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      • Great. You ought to see the little joke on my Inner KirKle list on twitter.

        For only $19.99 you can be promoted to Silver Inner KirKle. 😉 Gonna have levels up to Adamantium Diamond Wolverine Claws or something. lol. 😉

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      • I see your sister got the good looks in the family. Same here. I got the ability to read upside down though! 😉

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      • Oh yes, whatever you do. Don’t follow alot of people off a “list” at once. Twitter software identifies that as “aggressive following” and they will suspend you.

        It’s amazing they give us tools to network, then suspend you for using them, but that’s what they do…

        I only follow 5 or 10 a day off lists other people put me on. And I review their tweets and bios to see if I want to follow them.

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  14. I agree with some of the comments regarding Twitter – lots of work, sometime an after thought, some feeling like a slave to it. But, once you get a focused group of followers and following, you can kind of hop in and hop out as you wish. No pressure. I like it a lot.
    However, I can’t seem to warm to Facebook. Not getting the interaction that I hoped for admittedly due to my lack of effort and facility with the product. Doesn’t give me a warm fuzzy and since I don’t want any new friends as my current friends are a pain in the ass enough, I’m thinking it isn’t going to work.

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  15. I don’t know why people are so afraid of Twitter – I absolutely love it and find it much more informative and interesting than Facebook. FB is very good for things like photo albums etc. and extended chats. You can tweet on-the-spot photos and comments from wherever you happen to be. Also links to interesting articles about wine. And you can follow lots of other wine buffs and wine organizations etc. They will start following you, in no time. Also tweet every update to your blog/new blog post. I have got hundreds of new readers/subscribers to my blog, that way… You can be very focused with Twitter. I recommend it for any small business (or individual) or for anyone promoting a cause, etc…

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  17. I’m only a beginner, but when I set up WordPress to publish to Twitter, I got new readers, people who aren’t on WordPress. Twitter is a different, younger audience from Facebook. Plus, a lot of people are turned off to FB now because of privacy issues. It is good to edit the Twitter post before you hit submit, since your blog post title may not be sufficient. Add the hashtags (#wine, #Semillon) that will let people search for your topic. For me it is no additional work at all, except adding the hashtags. I’m not going to spend time doing extra tweets beyond my blog posts, since I already devote way too much time to WordPress… after all, I gotta know what you Wankers are up to! Glad to hear the house and wine cellar are intact…

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  18. I checked your followers when I woke up, and you are 34.

    I judge them to be high quality followers. IE real people. Many are WordPress bloggers. I followed those people myself and put them on my wordpress bloggers list.

    I didn’t see any spambot type accounts amongst your new followers. Those are the types that have porn in bios, tweet about buying twitter followers, only seem to tweet follow me, or follow these people and don’t provide any actual good content in their tweets. No racists, haters. Good people I think.

    You can use this tool to see if you have any “fake” followers. And then block them if you wish.

    http://fakers.statuspeople.com/Fakers/Scores

    I value authentic Tweeps, and am at 0 percent fake followers. I ruthlessly weed out and block those types listed above.

    I also unfollow and block large accounts that follow me, then unfollow after I follow. They do this so they can have large numbers of followers and a very small following list. They think that is cool or “sexy”. I think it’s rude. And they can use lists to follow who they really want to read. I’m a 50/50 kind of guy, if I follow you, I expect at minimum a follow back.

    If not, soyanora sunshine. I’m a hard man like that. 😉

    http://who.unfollowed.me/lite/history

    I only use free apps. These have paid versions but I don’t need the paid parts. The free is enough.

    If 140 characters isn’t quite enough, use this.

    http://www.twitlonger.com/account

    You had a good account growth from your blog post overnight. Well my overnight, haha. 😉

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  19. I’m not on Facebook via my blog but am on Twitter. I use it mostly to interact with other bloggers I’ve ‘met’ and will occasionally link a post here and there. I see many other bloggers link every post – so you’ll find your groove once you get a little more familiar, I’m sure. Good luck!

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  21. http://s1288.photobucket.com/user/KaufmansKavalkade/media/SharingOptions_zps2a9474d5.jpg.html

    WordPress kind of hides the options for hashtags and whatnot. Here’s a screenie of where to edit what the tweet will look like. It’s basically your article title (unless you edit it in the options) and whatever else #hashtags and info you add in the “Publicize” box on the right as you create your post.

    As you can see, I use every social media outlet that they offer except Path. WordPress blog is homebase.

    I then share to Pinterest, StumbledUpon & Reddit if the mood strikes me by using the share buttons on the post itself. Some of my poems get good returns off of Reddit. StumbledUpon, I get a bit. Pinterest is last in terms of visits to my blog. I don’t know why that is really. I don’t use Pinterest or follow people there heavily, so that’s probably it.

    Most people will intereact with you if you intereact with them. They don’t act like “stars” and not follow if you follow them. That’s my audience group I think. And I have a divergent group of followers, I’m not in a echo chamber, by design.

    I realize your core is #wine, but if you toss your funny posts into #humor I think you will see some visits Conrad. You have some funny in ya, hehe. It’s an entertaining read, and I’m accidentally learning more about wine while reading your stuff.

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      • Yeah, the real pros have links to about 100 or so that you can choose from. I thought 8 was alot.. It is for an individual or 3. But the total amount of Social Media is staggering really.

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  23. I prefer Instagram to Twitter. Too many people tweet way too much crap. On Instagram there can be a lot of lame photos (way too many selfies) however rather than a small sentence you can go with the whole ‘A Picture Paints 1000 Words’.

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  28. I’ll rather use my time constructively… drink wine and blog… as for twatter and fb… don’t get either but I do get LinkedIn… 😉
    LI have wine groups… maybe you could benefit?

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  37. I’m glad Andy reblogged this, and congrats you your milestone 🙂 We’re just figuring this stuff out too, and our blogs are all about three months old. I just learned how to actually use Twitter, and we’ve been brainstorming ways to make Facebook useful, because we have small personal networks there, we sorta like them that way, and the feeds work against us.

    We finally figured out that if we put every blog fan page into an open interest group, we could spend some of our Facebooking time liking, commenting, and sharing enough to get a lot of those blogs into our main feeds. It’s the coolest thing we’ve done on Facebook yet. Half a day of liking changed my feed content entirely. We’re up to 45 pages now, it’s a fast-moving feed already, and that means it’s always fresh.

    Since I really only talk to blog supporters and collaborators on Facebook anyway, I am just going to allow blogs I like to take over my main feed, and start sharing them to my fanpage strategically and use that list to study how the feeds actually work.

    Can’t really give you any pointers – I’m more an organizer and content-producer than social media genius, but I can tell you how I’m approaching Facebook. We’ve saturated our personal networks with blogstuff to the point that everyone who cares about our blogs knows where our fanpages are. We’ve cut down our personal sharing from our own pages. We’re leaving those pages in organic growth mode and using them to curate content until we can figure out a better use for them. We just don’t have time to spend on Facebook growth, because the effort-to-result ratio is too extreme. In terms of network-building, and audience-attracting, the margin is just too low for amateurs with full-time jobs and no marketing budget.

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    • Hi Gene’o! Twitter has been a strange one. I had no idea it would take us to where we are now. As you can see from above we didn’t expect much from it at all but it’s now a beast that craves to devour new flesh and just keeps putting on weight.

      I’ve never got Facebook and it just doesn’t seem to be a medium that has worked too well for us other than when we initially set up our blog and had a few friends watch us for a while via our Facebook feed. We had 150 likes when I wrote this 3 months ago and now we have almost 250. So it’s about 1 extra person per day versus the 100 or so we’re getting on twitter. LOL.

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      • Yes, lol. My experience almost exactly. We brought a very tiny core audience from Facebook. We used a little publicity stunt to debut my two blogs. I’ll tell you that story sometime, and I really expected to take a year to surpass that first day. I think you’re right about Twitter being a beast. The last week has been quite shocking for me in terms of real people interaction it’s enabled for us.

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