photo credit: Dawn Endico
It is no secret that social media tools like Facebook and Twitter are in the mainstream now-a-days, which is great for many different reasons, but also can be very bad if you are using these tools for business marketing functions. Why? Because of the way these tools are set-up and function from a user perspective. Let’s take this fictional case as an example.
You run a company that produces a certain kind of widget. After doing your research, you determine that a large audience and potential customer-base of your business are on Twitter and are actively engaged. You decide to create your Twitter presence and begin marketing your products and company information through this “new and exciting” medium. After all, it costs you virtually nothing, except for a little bit of time to create your tweets, but even that is only 140 characters, right?!?!? Using Twitter Search, you find some individuals you want to follow (because to be a good Twitter community member, and improve your visibility, you have to engage with others – which means following others too!). Perhaps they are some potential customers, current customers, suppliers, or even your competition. Then you notice some individuals start to follow you back! Great, this is a good start to your Twitter marketing campaign!
Now here is an important part… If you want to understand your audience and target market, make sure to look at each followers details (number of followers they have, number of people they are following, number of updates they have made, and the typical times during the day they have activity/post updates). This is a very important step, which I will explain later.
Next you take a couple of hours of your day to craft some great Twitter updates. You develop some web exclusive specials for your Twitter followers and you are super excited to get started. So you start doing your tweets – one a day, right away in the morning…
Nothing happens. Then one lead trickles in, but does not convert. Then the next morning another one comes in. No conversion, though. Then one sale comes through. Maybe another sale comes in one week later. You don’t understand why you don’t have more sales… you had great tweets and deals to share! I bet I know why… you got caught in the Twitter downstream!
What I mean by this is that during the course of the day, your tweets got lost in the masses of your audience’s screen! See, because of the overwhelming number of individuals on Twitter (or Facebook, for that matter), there is so much activity going on, that your tweet had at most maybe a minute on your viewer’s screen. From there it flows down the screen and out of the picture. Your hard work and marketing savvy… all just “washed” away! The volume of Twitter users and updates make it hard to reach your information-overloaded audience. That is why you need good planning from the start.
Remember when I told you earlier to pay attention to your followers as they begin to watch your stream? Well the reason I mentioned that is because it is important to your Twitter marketing strategy. By knowing how active your followers are, and how large their following base is, helps determine how much time you have to make an impression on your audience. If you know your audience is most active on Twitter between 11:00 am – 1:00 pm, schedule your tweets then. If you have a great tweet you want to be seen, perhaps you should post it a few times a day, overlapped with other tweets that do not offer a sales pitch (but be careful with this suggestion… you don’t want your users to think you are just posting the same thing all the time). Finally, make sure that your Twitter Bio leads visitors to a good landing page on your website. Maybe a page that has all of the Twitter specials on it, so that visitors will not think they missed something and can still capitalize on the deals you are offering.
Bottom line: Try and be creative. Your Twitter audience is consistently flooded with status updates, so you need to make sure yours stand out and get posted at the best possible times during the day.
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