Twitter: Using News to Connect with Your Audience

The Challenge: News and events provide powerful opportunities to connect with your audience. Twitter makes this easy. Following are 7 tips.

While not all companies can have a social media “touchdown” like Oreo’s now famous Superbowl blackout tweet, real time marketing is accessible to any size company. It only took 3 minutes to Tweet “Power Out? No Problem” with a captioned Oreo image “You Can Still Dunk in the Dark”.

Oreo is a great example of the discipline of Real Time Marketing. To see how important this has become, consider the Oscars and all the companies making attempts to become the next social media sweetheart. The marketing industry was even monitoring Twitter with #OscarsRTM documenting real time successes and failures.

Cleverly connecting with the audience is not reserved for big brands. Any size company can leverage news or events to make relevant connections through Twitter.

7 Takeaways for Marketers Using Twitter:

1. Knowing your audience provides an essential understanding of how they will react to your approach to a topic. Voice of Customer research by our firm reminds us to focus on the customer’s experience at all times across all channels. Evaluate using some of the many social media monitoring tools to keep up with what the public is saying.

2. Become a news resource for your industry. Announce newsworthy topics on Twitter ahead of the trend.

3. Real time response and empowered staff are essential. The social and content accelerators at ConvinceandConvert.com tell us “That’s why it’s so critically important to staff your social media front lines with people who not only have extraordinary passion for your company, but who also have the experience and judgment to minimize response delay”. Know what to look for when hiring a social media manager.

4. The media event and your company do not have to be related. However, you must add relevant value to the conversation. That value must tie back to your brand.

5. Communicate messages with the intent to interact. It’s not about selling. Richard Robins advises, “Customers want to be engaged, not targeted. With the exception of a few "passion" brands whose customers wait for any bit of product news, customers largely don't care about products. (If we cared, brands wouldn't have to pay $4 million for ads to reach us.) “

6. Learn from some significant mistakes committed during the past year. Stay on top of current events and understand why a topic is trending. The last thing you want is to gain attention for a social media #fail.

7. Do not expect every venture into real time marketing to work. Like other disciplines in marketing, this is all about testing and measurement.

Twitter: Taking Multichannel Marketing To New Levels

The Challenge: During Ad Week, Twitter VP Joel Lunenfeld drew a staggering correlation between a user’s activity on Twitter and their television watching habits. What could this mean for multichannel customer engagement?

During his IAB Mixx presentation at Ad Week, Joel Lunenfeld, Twitter’s global brand strategy VP, shared data that Twitter had gathered about users’ brand relationships. According to Lunenfeld, 9 out of 10 users follow at least one brand on Twitter.

While most users followed brands for the sake of receiving promotional news, 87% followed brands for entertainment purposes and 80% did so for access to exclusive content.

More interesting, however, was the correlation found between Twitter usage and TV watching habits. “Twitter is the EKG of action for television,” said Lunenfeld, citing data that showed 50% of Twitter users do so while watching TV. This provides massive opportunities for multi-channel engagement, and brands are capitalizing on this by turning their Twitter conversations into ad campaigns.

Audi, for example, noted that a fan posted a tweet with the hashtag “#IWantAnR8”. In response, they brought the fan an R8 to test-drive, and turned the entire experience into a commercial. Instances like this demonstrate that the barrier between advertising channels is blurring every day, and that content is quickly becoming more important than ever.

American Express is also taking advantage of the Twitter multichannel phenomenon with their Sync program, which transforms special Twitter #hashtags into savings for card members. If a U.S. card member is eligible, they can sync their AmEx Card with Twitter, and when they tweet using special offer hashtags, savings are automatically loaded onto the synced Cards, with no coupons or printouts required. In this game-changing example, AmEx is turning Twitter content into commerce by connecting card members directly to merchants and delivering value to both.

Key Takeaways for Marketers
1. Engagement on multiple channels is essential.
Consumers have come to expect a multichannel experience from their marketing. Twitter may not be the first to attempt multichannel marketing, but it’s quickly becoming a bastion for companies that want preference-driven, engagement-rich campaigns.

2. Give people reasons and ways to share.
Giving customers the tools and incentive to share across multiple channels is the perfect way to engage them and enrich their experience. AmEx exemplifies this, giving their customers both value and the means to share that value with others via Twitter.

3. Blur the lines between conversation and marketing.
As we saw in the Audi example, social media marketing can be enhanced by crossing channels and bringing conversations to life for users. It generates positive press, gets people talking, and creates a genuine level of trust between you and your customers.