Twitter Marketing has taken many shapes and forms over the past 5 years but a strategy that has proven effective for building brands is the practice of helping the user. Most Businesses will complaint that they don’t have time to listen to what the user is having for lunch or what they are going to do on weekends. In fact, you can focus on conversations that are relevant for your industry or your product/services. Here are some best practices:
1) Filter Conversation
The biggest criticism against twitter is the number of irrelevant updates that the users are sending. That is where tools like Hootsuite will help you find conversations relevant to your industry.
If you are an ipad retailer, then the conversations that would be important for you are about “iPad costs”. Let us assume that you provide the most competitive costs for ipad and also provide an excellent after sales service.
As you can see you have found your relevant conversation. The first temptation would be to sell them directly but a better strategy would be to introduce the user to a blog posts that you have written about buying ipad. If you are selling based on price, then you can directly tweet the user with your best deals.
2) Follow Relevant Users
Relevancy is the key here. Understanding your customer demographic is crucial in effectively marketing your products/services. In the above example, the user is looking for the cheapest ipad. Are you providing the cheapest ipad in town, better than Wal-Mart? If you are not then it might not be a good idea to follow the user and tweet about your deal.
Learn how to use relevant Twitter Search Terms
3) Follow Influencers
But before you decide that you shouldn’t follow the user, find out how influential the user is. Internet and Social Media follow the 90-9-1 rule: 90% of users are observers, 9% contribute from time to time and 1% is the hyper active contributors, who are responsible for majority of the content. Majority of influencers come under the 1% hyper active users. So you know the first rule of finding influencers - shortlist users who tweet a lot. Next step is to rate the quality of the tweet. Filter the tweets based on your market
You can click the profile in say Hootsuite and find the Klout of the user. A Klout score above 25 shows that the user has a good influence in their network. It is not just the number of followers/number of following ratio that is important but how influential is the user.
In the above case the Number of Followers/Number of following ratio is 92/299 = 0.3
Any ratio less than 1 is not a great ratio but you should not decide influencers just based on the above ratio.
Find out the Klout Score. The user has a Klout score of 42, which means that the user has high influence among his followers. Also look at the number of updates – over 8000 which is normal for a teenager (check out the blog URL). He has a blog. How influential is the blog? Find out! Now he might not buy ipad from your store because let’s say you can’t compete with Wal-Mart but if have written a great blog post on “Buying IPads”, then the user just might mention that in his blog. Your blog post has just received a link from an influential user. If you want to learn which traffic source sends the most valuable users read out post Traffic Source with Best ROI
4) Follow Industry Leaders
Following industry leaders let say for gadgets, follow the likes of engadget, pcmag and cnet. This would not only give you the latest news about ipads (which you can use to write articles about ipads) but if you are offering unique ipad offers, you can have a conversation with the social media team.
The rule of thumb when you converse with industry leaders is don’t send them links in your first conversation. Introduce yourself and talk a little bit about the unique deal (without the links). Now the important part in this conversation is “unique”. They might be bombarded with re-sellers like you who want to be mentioned. Find out how others are conversing with these sites:
Now the first conversation didn’t get any response. Folks at engadget will not review your offer just because your loved one created a new product.
The second conversation was more meaningful. It focussed on a feature of FLOTE that basically summed up what the product was.
The third conversation didn't add any additional information.
If the initial conversation was without any links and focused on three interesting benefits of FLOTE then the response would have been better.
5) Help First then Sell
This is the toughest thing to do. As marketers, we tend to think about ROI, right from the get go. In fact, you should do so. But there are many markets, especially publications where helping a user by providing them with information might not result in direct sales (the user might not buy products) or affiliate sales through your website. But the user might be responsible for spreading your brand to a wider network. So before thinking about ROI, help the user.
If you want help in effectively communicating using Twitter, contact us or you can call us at: India (Ph): +91 9497189032, UK (Ph): +44 (0)20-3371-9976 or US (Ph): +1 650-491-0004
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