Community Corner

Twitter is a Way of Life for Uncle Louie

Sachem alum offers weekly Q&A opportunities with the community.

This is an occasional series about a Sachem alum utilizing social media in his everyday business strategies for celebrities around the country ...

Let's look at Twitter like a real life scenario. How many "friends" do you have? At some point, do "new friends" over take "old friends" and at what point do you have "too many friends?"

What I mean is, have you ever tried to have a few conversations at the same time? How about 5,000? Welcome to Twitter! As part of the on-going series with Sachem alum and social media strategist Louis Gregory - aka Uncle Louie in the entertainment world - we'll overview Twitter, explain how it works, or doesn't work for that matter, and share some Twitter experiences that he's had over the years.

"Twitter serves a different purpose for different people," he said. "That being said, similar to relationships, we each have different ideas for what we'd like to get out of it. Some are lurkers, reading what's going on but never tweeting what they're doing.

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"Many just find it cool to interact with celebrities; whether it be athletes, actors, recording artists, political figures, business execs or even religious leaders. The tweeters that many others follow are influencers because thousands read their short messages, many of whom retweet those messages, serving to amplify their reach."

Retweet simply means to resend or forward a tweet to your followers. As @TheFatBoys manager, Gregory used to tweet from their account before he had his own.

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"At a certain point I was very upset with a hardware store's customer service, so I took to Twitter and tweeted my frustration," he said. "Although we only had roughly 20,000 followers at the time, that tweet approached the one million view mark."

Why? Because 20,000 followers were engaged and as a result of their influence, they retweeted that Tweet. So, for example, if they had 5,000 followers, his reach was amplified from another 20,000 to a shared 25,000 and so on and so forth with each retweet.

"Needless to say, I got a call from the store's corporate HQ shortly thereafter, pleading to fix the problem I had," he said.

Stay tuned to this series and submit your questions about social networking and Uncle Louie will choose some to answer. Follow @SachemPatch and @UncleLouie on Twitter.


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