04 Mar 09 Your Brand on Twitter 1
Coupons on Twitter are becoming more common. But are they of real value to a business? The answer to that question lies in the motivation of a consumer to follow a company on Twitter. Lets look at a few brands and how they are using Twitter. I found these examples through the social brand index.
Note: This turned out to be a really long post, so I went Kill Bill on it and split it up into a series of posts.
Most Tweeters are following so many people that any coupons that may come their way will probably get overlooked. You could subscribe to CouponTweet or Cheaptweet, but how is that different to subscribing to couponmountain or ecoupons? Joey Mucha points out that using Twitter has added value to the brand due to the word-of-mouth potential of Twitter: “Impressive, no more slickdeals.net for me. Rewarding the twitter community with deals will pay huge dividends from company through the word of mouth it creates….”
Starbucks – 66000 followers, 64000 following
http://twitter.com/Starbucks
In Twitter Land since August 2008, Starbucks have amassed a healthy following of evangelists.
M&Ms – 12000 followers, 1 following
http://twitter.com/msgreen
Considering they’ve been on Twitter since January 2008, It’s fair to say that M&M’s are having a fruitless Twitter experience. The problems as I see them are that they are not tweeting often enough. Several tweets a day should be the norm. rather than one tweet every few days. They need to follow their followers. Showing an interest in your customers never hurt anyone!
Amazon – 5861 follower, 16 following
http://twitter.com/amazondeals
Have just jumped on http://twitter.com/amazon but have a stronger following for their daily gold box specials RSS feed which has been live since June 2007. This is a poor effort for such a major internet property. The problem it would seem, is that they offer no added value in their Twitter feed.
Buy.com – 562 followers, 126 following
http://twitter.com/Buy_com
A very focused series of tweets about specials. Live since August 2008, they have a meager 562 followers. Seem to suffer from the same ailment as Amazon, but they’re doing much worse.
Wholefoods.com – 160,000 followers, 159,000 following
http://twitter.com/wholefoods
Not one coupon or special as far as the eye can see, but they have done an awesome job at building a community.
Dell.com – 116,242 followers, 21 following
http://twitter.com/delloutlet
After its launch in July 2006, Twitter’s first users were tech-savvy early adopters. Though the service is now used by a much more diverse group of people, it still has a strong technically oriented contingent, which makes it a good customer connectivity channel for Dell who use the service as an exclusive offers channel. While they do not follow many Tweeters, they do respond to their questions, maintaining the community feel. In fact, because they only follow 21 profiles, one is more likely to click to find out who they are….and it turns out they are other Dell accounts for different geographic regions and departments. Nice one Dell!
Tags: Branding, linkedin, Social Media Marketing, Twitter
