You may, like me, be baffled as to why so many people spend so much time posting drivel on sites like Twitter and Facebook. But the fact is, they do and will continue to do so, so if we want to grow our imutual community without spending members' money on advertising, then we are jolly well going to have to embrace social networking.
Actually, let's not be too negative about these sites. Sharing the minutiae of your daily life is not a requirement of using them, and they do actually serve some very useful purposes; from sharing information, staying in touch with people and organising events to bringing down middle eastern despots
The good news is that we're going to try and make this as easy as possible for you AND we'll reward people with shares for helping out
The focus of this post is
twitter. For the uninitiated, twitter allows you to post (or 'tweet') short public messages (up to 140 characters). You register and choose an account name, which is prefixed by an @ symbol e.g. mine is @ryendall and imutual has its own account @imutual
You can choose to 'follow' other twitter users, and then their 'tweets' will appear on your twitter page (or 'timeline' as its known). Similarly, anyone who follows you will see your 'tweets' on their timeline. The idea is to follow people and topics of interest; although tweets are very short, they often have links to other web pages with more substantial content. Twitter's brevity is its strength, together with the fact that you can read and write tweets easily 'on the move' using your phone.
The first significant use we're going to make of Twitter will be on Monday, because you'll be able to put questions to me during the live AGM webcast using your Twitter account. More details to follow....
Anyway, here's the carrot to get you signed up; the first 1000 members to follow these steps will receive
a bonus of 50 shares:
-
Follow imutual on Twitter (you'll need to create a free Twitter account if you don't already have one)
- Enter your Twitter username in your
imutual forum profile
-
Send us a 'tweet' asking for your 50 free shares e.g. "@imutual Please give me my 50 bonus shares in imutual PLC"
You can do these three in any order, just so long as you do them. It's quick and costs you nothing, so go for it! Then allow us a day or so to respond; we'll add your shares and post a 'Thank you'.
Note: your Twitter account must be unrestricted i.e. everyone must be able to view your 'Tweets'
See images below for guidance