Marketing on Twitter
Read this article if: Your target audience is the tech-savvy millennial or gen-y age group.
An instant message (IM) is great because it has the immediacy of a phone call without the intrusiveness. But what happens when everyone you know uses IM and wants to chat with you at the same time? What if you want to tell everyone the same thing? This is the problem millennials faced, until Twitter came along.
Twitter is sort of a party line for IM. You receive a real-time, single feed of short messages (<160 characters), or “tweets”, that are the aggregation of all the people you are “following”. You, in turn, have “followers” that receive all of your tweets. The concept of followers allows for one way relationships (e.g. I follow Marc but he doesn’t follow me.) For this reason, it is often referred to as micro-blogging. Twitter does allow for “directs” (tweets sent to a single person) and “replies” to allow for private messages. Users of Twitter can receive updates through the Twitter.com web site but typically receive their messages via SMS to their mobile phones or use a desktop client like Twhirl.
Twitter can be used as a marketing tool very similar to a blog. Push out the right stream of messages and you’ll build a loyal set of followers who covet your messages and share them with friends. Push out stale, corporate-sounding notes and you’ll be talking to yourself.
Create an account at Twitter.com and use these ideas to kick-start your millennial marketing program:
- Give people a reason to follow you. Announce news and special event notices BEFORE it hits your web site. Offer deals only available to followers.
- Promote your Twitter feed on your web site. Show the last few tweets on your corporate web site. There are plugins to do this automatically, or access via Twitter’s API.
- Follow people in your target audience. A lot of people will follow you back. Use this info to find out what your target audience is really talking about.
- Promote job opportunities. Don’t let marketing have all the fun. Twitter is a great place to market job openings to millennials.
- Talk with existing customers. Let these folks help do your marketing. Provide them with upgrade offers and product use tips. Maybe this could be a separate Twitter account.
Wednesday, September 10th, 2008
