Business Coaching

Marla Erwin helped Whole Foods master social media.

Think you’re busy trying to constantly update your own Twitter page? Imagine handling more than a million Twitter followers.

Marla Erwin, Interactive Art Director for Whole Foods, is credited with Whole Foods’ social media success. In its first year on Twitter, Whole Foods gained a million followers. Since starting with Twitter, Whole Foods now has several separate accounts for users who have more specific questions about the store’s products — a Twitter account for cheese, one for Whole Foods recipes, etc.

How did Marla garner so many followers? She incorporated user-generated content onto Whole Foods’ Twitter and Facebook accounts. Recipes, product ratings and reviews and comments on the Whole Foods’ blog all went onto their Twitter feed.

Marla then went on to use Facebook and Twitter for different uses: Facebook she uses for more editorial content and to start discussions among fans and friends (since users can see others’ comments on Facebook, it’s easier to have a discussion), and Twitter she uses for Whole Foods promotions, information for customers, to answer customers’ questions and tweet out links to Whole Foods’ blog.

Read the whole article here,  and see if any of what Marla did for Whole Foods’ Twitter and Facebook can be used for your business.

Not all Tweeters wear trench coats, but it's an option.

So hot, that a few Tweeters with upwards of 24,000 followers have been featured in February’s Vanity Fair issue. And only one of them is an actress.

Of the six women featured, most were writers or marketing strategists, and gained their thousands and millions of followers by constantly tweeting. Every day and well into every night, these women might as well have their phones attached to their hands. But by Twittering interesting 140-character posts just about all the time and engaging with other users and followers, they’ve become Twilebrities. It means exactly what you think it means: a Twitter celebrity.

The article does point out the downside to all they do: they don’t receive a dime in terms of getting paid to actually tweet. In fact, even though Twitter is worth $1 billion, it has very little revenue and absolutely no profit.

But, with thousands to millions of followers, these women do gain exposure to whatever they’re tweeting about. And that’s the easiest way to market anything: tell people about something great, and they’ll be sure to tell others.

Side note: judging from the photo of these Twitterholics in Vanity Fair, tweeting consistently apparently gives you great gams. So, there’s that to gain from tweeting, too.