Tools

I work for a young and fairly successful financial services company, which is very keen on social media. While I appreciate that we don't want to be left behind in this brave new world of technology, on top of my regular work, I am now expected to broadcast work-related content on Twitter several times a day. I only have 50 followers and am wondering whether it's actually worth the effort. What do you think of Twitter as a marketing tool?

Twitter, like anything else, needs to be used for the right reasons and as often as it should be. It's really not a very good idea to judge tweets in numbers (ie we need you to tweet five times a day), it's a much better idea to come up with a plan and strategise the issues that you need to get out there. I really don't think it's a clever idea just to send random messages as people stop reading boring tweets. And people who think they can just use them as a marketing tool underestimate the savvy nature of most other users. The key is to work out where and what to tweet.

A lot of people misunderstand Twitter. They just assume it's an automatic thing and all you do is just get on it, get loads of followers and that will be it. There are two issues with this. One is that it's not that easy to get your followers — you have to be interesting and you need to communicate regularly, although this does not mean putting up bland comments. It's about having something very interesting to say. The second thing about Twitter is just because people follow you or read what you say, it doesn't always lead to an action. If you are trying to market something, it might build a relationship but this does not necessarily mean that the relationship will turn into a sale or a contractual agreement or whatever. Twitter is not the automatic way of getting the world to buy your product and a lot of people think it is.

I am in the process of setting up a charity, kicking off with a large scale event and competition to raise awareness of the cause. I've not had much experience in this type of event management and I am fnding it difficult to get the support I need. It seems that most charities have celebrity patrons at their helm — something I'd like to adopt. However, my requests thus far have been met with silence. Can you recommend the best way for me to approach celebrities and other potential sponsors, in order to ensure my event goes with a bang and raises lots of money for a very worthy cause.

I get asked to be involved in hundreds of charitable causes on a regular basis and it is very difficult to get my attention. But the ones most likely to succeed are the charities that give me a very good reason to be interested in them. Do your research on your target personality and make it personal to them, eg I know you have dogs, or I see you are interested in horses. Explain very quickly what the charity does and then go on to say exactly what is required from them. It may be that your charity just wants a name above the door, or a patron and it's much easier to say yes to that than it is to say yes to somebody who needs 12 days of your time, or who needs x amount of money. You need to be very clear upfront about the level of involvement that it will take and that often means the time — whether the commitment is one day a year or whatever. For busy people, time is probably more valuable than their money. It's much easier for me just to hand my cash over rather than make a time commitment so I am more concerned about the amount of time it is going to take me than I am about the investment.

Deborah Meaden is author of Common Sense Rules (Random House, £7.99). Read more advice from Deborah Meaden.

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