Viralogy

Website: RedheadWriting
Twitter:@RedheadWriting
Bio: Erika Napoletano is the Director of Communications & Content for InvestorLoft, and specializes in SEO copywriting and social media marketing. Her personal blog and Twitter feed, branded RedheadWriting, focuses on social media, business and life practices, doing so in an upbeat and light-hearted way.

Social Media Tactics discusses various ways social and new media users build relationships and add value to their audience. Each week, we will look at various marketers, entrepreneurs, designers, writers and analysts, focusing on one person/group that uses the tactic successfully. This feature is designed to show you some of the best ways to enhance your own brand and social media presence, while demonstrating how some smart users employ social media tactics.

The Social Media Tactics series can be found here.

• Engaging Your Community Pt. 1: Chris Pirillo

The musings on the RedheadWriting blog and Twitter account are known especially for their jocular and often curse-infused manner. Cursebird says @RedheadWriting swears like a George Carlin Wananbe and gives her a 100 of 100 for her cursing, ranking her 3,076 worldwide. (Comparatively, I’m 2,235,747th worldwide – a Horse Whisperer) She is also known for her witty and sarcastic writing style on her blog, with posts like “How to be Annoying on Twitter in Three Easy Steps” and “Don’t Take it Personally but I’m Not Going to Follow You on Twitter”.

One of the most successful ways that Erika leverages her social media presence is by engaging her community. Using Twitter and her own blog, she adds value to her audience by not only the posts she makes, but by listening and sharing interesting bits of information with her twitter followers and blog readers.

How RedheadWriting Engages Her Community

Twitter: By following only a certain number of people, she manages to stay on top of the important updates in her stream. While many Twitter users will put on autofollow and try to build a huge base of people by following all users back, Erika makes it a priority to actively select which people she will follow based on her own interests. She does this knowing full well that she will lose some followers because of it, but notes that following someone on Twitter is like a dinner party – “when I invite people into my Twitter feed, I’m offering to cook them risotto”. She realizes that it is not a social obligation to follow someone back on Twitter.

By selectively choosing who she follows, Erika is able to actually read through her tweetstream and forward on interesting tweets as opposed to merely using it as a platform for her own ideas and statements. You can see this effect in her retweet generosity – over 15% of her posts are RTs of other users. For comparison’s sake, @chrisbrogan is only 6%, @jowyang has less than 5% RTs. Because of her high Twitter generosity, @RedheadWriting receives high grades on Twitter rating sites as well, receiving a Twitter Grade of 99.6 and her clout on Twitalyzer is “very high”.

Blog: The other way that Erika connects with her community online is through her blog. Though not a frequently-updated blog, the RedheadWriting blog is full of humorous and inspirational insights. Each one of her blog posts is crafted to tell a story and focuses on current social media trends, and she does a good job of responding to comments left on her posts.

The Redhead does a great job of managing a moderate audience by being selective with which people she follows and choosing to maintain a high signal:noise ratio. Where some power Twitter users like Chris Pirillo or Guy Kawasaki have a great deal of followers and can often run into issues of noise overload, Erika keeps her follow stream lean and mean. As a result, she can respond and interact with a greater proportion of her community, and use her social media accounts to flip the funnel, not just listening, but spreading information along as well.

She creates a great example for those with small-medium communities - listening in to conversations helps you disseminate good information, and your own wit and intellect (even if profane can build a community just as well as mass following. More importantly, a strong community built on honesty and respect will go a much longer way to recording that sale than a community built on superficiality.

Jaremy Rich is the founder of winAround, a social networking website for gamers, and writes a technology, marketing and gaming blog called Techshots.