In a lot of respects, this is understandable. If your Twitter account refers little to no website traffic, generates no leads and prompts very little replies, it's easy to think there are no visible benefits to having a corporate Twitter account. However for businesses approaching Twitter looking for these benefits, their campaign is doomed to fail.
Rather than thinking about what Twitter lacks in comparison to other marketing media, I like to think about what it has that others don't. Essentially Twitter provides the opportunity to talk one-to-one with your customers; to talk back to them and have them talk back to you, often directly to their mobile phone. Pretty intimate when you think about it. This is a level of access no other social media can provide, and to expect a direct sale or click response from your followers is never going to work, and at worst, turn them off your brand all together.
So, how do you make Twitter work?
In this week's Thumbs Up Award, let's take a look at an example of how a big brand can manage their Twitter profile, and pick out some ideas you can use in taking your own profile forward.
I've chosen the profile of game developer Popcap Games (@popcap_games), as I think it's one of the more successful Twitter feeds at connecting with its audience and providing valuable information.
What We Like
Despite being the Twitter feed for one of the biggest iPhone application developers in the world, there is very little indication that it is a corporate account.
The tweets are varied between shout-outs to fans, a bit of corporate news, and lots and lots of @-replies. For those uninitiated on the functions of Twitter, @-replies are when a user posts a message directly to another user by beginning the tweet with their Twitter username.
If you want to set your company apart from others and build an extremely loyal following, then @-replies are where it's.…well… at. Twitter was designed for short 140 character conversations between users, so why not use it that way. Treating Twitter as a one-way broadcast medium is no more innovative than a blog. The value lies in talking to your customers and actually listening to what they have to say.
Why It Works
Imagine your flight has just landed and you tweet from the Virgin terminal how much you're looking forward to your holiday, and you receive a tweet back from Virgin asking "How was your flight?".
It says a lot about how much a company cares for their customers and that they care about their customers' experience. You may even talk about that night over dinner and, who knows, Virgin may have just generated a family of loyal followers all for the cost of one tweet.
Ideas You Can Use
Popcap's games include Bejeweled, Peggle, and the wildly successful Plants vs Zombies, so you can imagine the amount of traffic referencing these games on the web would be very difficult to manage. However there are professional tools like HootSuite which you can use to monitor and keep on top of the chatter about your company and your industry. For more info on this application contact your friendly Traffika consultant.
The Popcap Games Twitter feed also shows that not all articles published under a corporate name need to drive a corporate message. There are other media outlets for that. On Twitter it's more helpful to communicate with your followers on a more friendly level. Show them something interesting, solve one of their problems, or just talk to them.
Popcap Games has monitored their follower-base and gained respect by listening to and engaging with their fans through their Twitter feed. So this week we're happy to award the the Traffika Thumbs Up Award. Well done guys!
