10 Mar 09 Your Brand on Twitter III – The Practical
Some great ways to use Twitter include:
Tell everyone where your $2 tacos are available for sale
Write a book, 140 characters at a time
Get direct access to anyone who tweets about your brand
Networking: Start getting to know people who are attending the same event as you before you get there.
Private Tweets: Why is @appleinc posts private? I’d really like to know. Make your posts private and only let invited guests view them.
Twitter is another way to connect. All your customers have different preferences for how they wish to communicate with you. Twitter caters to the tastes of a subset of your customer base. Therefore, it makes sense to include it in your marketing / customer service mix.
Here’s more tips on using Twitter: Twitter with Flitter , How to Use Twitter as a Twool , How to Pick Up on Twitter , Brands That Tweet
Tags: Brand Strategy, linkedin, Social Media Marketing, social networks, Twitter
05 Mar 09 Your Brand on Twitter II
The standouts of the brands listed in Your Brand on Twitter I are Starbucks, Wholefoods and Dell. They have successfully developed Twitter communities rather than run-of-the-mill one way marketing channels that do not involve their customers. This is where all the other brands have fallen over in their Twitter strategies.
The value of Twitter appears to be the ability of your customers to have a seemingly direct line of communication to the brands that they enjoy. People don’t seem overly interested in Twitter feeds that do nothing more than highlight specials and dispense coupons. We already get enough of this via email and RSS feeds. Twitter is best used as a communication medium that elicits the values of the brand involved. Dispensing useful information rather than blatant promotions seems to be more amicable. I think Wholefoods.com have such a large following because of their ability to do this. You can read more coverage on Wholefoods Twitter strategy and also Zapos’ here.
Guy Kawasaki, a well known business leader has also amassed a respectable 75,000 strong following. Guy has a reputation for being a good writer and dispenser of quality and practical strategies that business people can employ to stay ahead of the competition. His tweets are always worth checking because you can be sure there will be a link or two of tremendous value.
So it may be that Twitter is a better fit for some brands than others, or it may be that some brands have figured out how to use Twitter properly. Another question is: How should we measure success on Twitter? The number of followers offers a solid comparison between brands and could be used as an indication of the influence that a brand holds in a market.
The real test is to see if there is any increase in sales. In many cases it is clear that Twitter is a goodwill strategy that should benefit long term sales. In others like Dell, it seems that it is also a useful direct marketing tool that benefits short term sales.
Tags: Brand Strategy, linkedin, Social Media Marketing, social networks, Twitter
