Guest comment: Top 5 tips for harnessing Twitter for brands
- Added:
- Apr 16, 2009
How can brands get the most out of Twitter? Tom Griffiths, Business Development Manager at CheezeDMG offers some tips to generate conversions through conversations.
Twitter’s here. You can't visit a website or turn a page, digital or otherwise, without reading about it. Whether it’s Jonathan Ross’ banter (www.twitter.com/wossy) or breaking news stories - Sky has a Twitter correspondent and CNN has the highest following of any user (http://twitter.com/cnnbrk) ; yet it’s the user who’s breaking news before the news agencies - the plane dumping in the Hudson River being the most high profile example.
Twitter’s being used as a news channel, an information hub, but the user has more power than ever. Of course brands are keen to follow this trend and harness it to their own benefit.
So how can brands make their voices heard in a world where the user, your potential customer, doesn’t have to listen?
It’s a level playing field, so your brand has to operate at the consumer’s level; don’t simply broadcast offers and ‘news’ - become part of the conversation.
Some brands have been active for a while - smaller ones like eSpares (www.twitter.com/espares) are doing a great job of harnessing the channel, larger brands like Canterbury of New Zealand (www.twitter.com/canterburynz) are just starting; and then you’ve got huge global brands like Dell (www.dell.com/twitter) that have already seen over $1m of revenue from the channel.
Charities are at it too - Dogstrust (www.twitter.com/dogstrust) are doing a fantastic job engaging with their ‘followers’, and PDSA are starting to get involved off the back of their Facebook success (www.twitter.com/PDSA_HQ).
All these brands are seeing success through engagement – involve yourself, provide advice, respond to questions, ‘react’ to your customers, and the proactive nature of marketing becomes flipped. However, the effectiveness of building brand advocates, raising awareness and ultimately promoting your products and services by ‘stealth’ is huge – subtle branding, who would have thought it?
Set to grow even further, Twitter may also spin out with the associated growth of similar 'tools' like www.Identi.ca, www.plurk.com and www.jaiku.com - owned by Google. Having a presence on Twitter now will help you understand the medium and benefit your brand and the consumer.
So, if you’re looking to harness Twitter, where to start? Here are five tips to get you going:
1. Get on there! Get involved! There’s no better place to start than with yourself. Sign up for an account, follow some people - you can start with me: www.twitter.com/tomgriffola, I talk about digital marketing, rugby and music - and get tweeting a little. Find some people or brands in your sector and watch what they’re doing. You can gain a lot from interacting and watching before you reveal a brand presence.
2. See what people are saying about your brand using http://search.twitter.com - grab the feed and watch it for a while. Is the conversation positive or negative? This will help you define what your presence on Twitter needs to be. It may also help you quickly find brand ambassadors who can amplify your presence. Don't forget the detractors - connecting with them on Twitter and helping them may create a rapid turnaround in their opinion.
3. Work out what you’re going to say, and who’s going to manage it. In some cases an agency can help get you off the ground and hand over the running once you’re familiar with the process. You can stick to a content theme, or a reason as to why you’re on Twitter, but don’t use it as a broadcast channel. All tweeting and no listening will lose you credibility - very quickly!
4. Get your brand onto Twitter. Grab a name - ideally www.twitter.com/yourbrandname, set up your logo and a template design and start twittering. If you can reference your brand on your own corporate page that will help establish credibility for the brand on Twitter. At this time there are no regulations or checks - it’s up to you to manage your brand on Twitter. Connect it to your other channels - you can feed your Twitter stream into a Facebook Fan Page or your own website.
5. Start talking - follow people you find interesting, have a conversation. If you’re sending links to your site, think about adding tracking tags. URL etiquette in Twitter’s 140 character dialogue is to use a shortened URL via tinyurl or similar, so add your tracking in before converting the url. This can help you understand what value this channel is delivering for you, over and above interaction, enabling you to track traffic from conversation through to conversion.
By Tom Griffiths
Business Development Manager
CheezeDMG
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