From zero to social media hero in 12 months

This month Coracle released the first ever maritime Twitter Top 40 on their Coracle Voice site. Designed to be the “who’s who” of the twittersphere, it ranks the top 40 maritime Twitterers (or is that Tweeters?) in order based on their influence, popularity, engagement and trust. ShipServ comes in the Top 20, at a respectable 19th place. Impressive when you consider the people above us have more focus, time, content and, in some cases, money to really zoom up the chart.

Even more impressive is that when we set up our Twitter account just over a year ago, we struggled to find 40 marine twitterers let alone produce a top 40. We now have over 506 followers, and follow 435 ourselves. We’ve made new (business) friends, struck a few deals and learnt a hell of a lot. That’s amazing progress in just 12 months.  Which just goes to underline the rapidly increasing potential of this social media thing (include here LinkedIN, Facebook and other social networking tools). Do it right, it costs nothing and takes very little time.

As you can tell we’re advocates for this sort of thing. We use it as part of our own sales/marketing/outreach programme, and find the ROI impressive. So we wholeheartedly recommend you join the conversation yourself. Get yourself a twitter account, join a LinkedIN Group and set up a Facebook fan page. Read our 10 Essentials to Online Marketing in Shipping Guide. It’ll open up new opportunities and create new relationships.

But don’t take our word for it. Read this interesting interview with Daniel Kane, Co-founder and Vice-President at Propulsion Dynamics. It’s a great example of a maritime supplier getting online and getting social.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 1st, 2010 at 12:51 pm.