Twitter Strategy
Twitter is definitely flavour of the month but get past the hype and it still can be used as an effective business communication tool, but can it be more?
If you break down basic business objectives that could apply to just about any business then you would probably end up with a list something like this:
- Build and measure market leadership
- Build and measure brand equity
- Build and measure growth and profits
These three basic business objectives fit nicely into the sales funnel.
Market Leadership
This is a fundamental objective and is social media terms this is all about awareness. Who’s talking about you and what are they saying. Market leaders generally have good unprompted recall against their product set. This means they are in a customers frame of reference, or as Al Ries would have said ‘front of mind’.
Twitter Relevance: Measuring and building market leadership using Twitter is quite simple – monitor how many times a day your brand is mentioned, what the sentiment is and set out to improve both.
Brand Equity
Once you are on the consumers radar you need brand equity to come out of the consideration phase with a chance of scoring a sale. This means being part of the conversation.
Twitter Relevance: How many followers do you have? How many @replies and direct messages do you get? How engaged are your followers? Easy to measure, simple to improve.
Growth and Profits
Visits, link clicks, purchases, all measures of growth and profits.
Twitter Relevance: How many people click through to your site from your Twitter profile? Are you measuring clicks on links in posts using bit.ly or similar? Easy to measure, simple to improve, Dell attributed $1 million in sales to Twitter.
Twitter can be used to build and measure market leadership, brand equity and growth and profits, building awareness, getting considered and driving purcheses.
