Corporate Risk Solutions (CRS) based in Guernsey in the Channel Islands, offers a niche risk manage-ment and outsourced compliance service to the financial services industry. CRS is passionate about ensuring excellence in client service delivery and prides itself on offering a bespoke service tailored to clients’ individual needs. Led by Managing Director Darren Wadley who is a regulatory and compliance professional, the company has enjoyed rapid growth during its first year of operation.

Context

As a young operation having to be particularly smart with their marketing spend, CRS recognised the importance Twitter could play in their marketing strategy. They have always focused on inbound marketing and incorporated Twitter into this as a key way of increasing awareness and connecting them with other professionals, especially important to CRS as they are a B2B company. If utilized correct-ly, Twitter can help businesses develop a good level of visibility quite quickly whilst ensuring a good return on investment.

Objectives

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CORPORATE RISK

SOLUTIONS

CRS was keen to develop a reputation for thought leadership in their field. To be successful on Twitter it is essential that companies give people a reason to follow and interact with them. They started out in a modest way by tweeting links to their recently published posts but soon realised the need to improve and utilize how they used Twitter and thats where SocialBro came in.

Due to increasing demand since it was set up in 2011, CRS now employs six full time members of staff and has clients from all disciplines of the Guernsey finance industry.

TARGETING USERS AND EXPANDING THEIR REACH

CRS started out thinking along the right lines by publishing posts that would interest the people they wanted to connect with. Instead of waiting for users to find them, they started using SocialBro as a way of targeting desirable users and expanding their reach. To increase their reach they had to gain more followers and most importantly the right followers. They recognised that the quality of their Twitter community is more important than the numbers, after all they are a business and businesses don’t make money just from having users follow them. Followers need to have the potential to be conver-ted into leads, promote the brand in some way or provide them with useful information. One criteria of users that CRS particularly wanted to connect with were “finance industry opinion formers” so that they could be aware of what they were saying and could react/ reply in a timely manner.

SocialBro provides users with advanced search and filter options including bio keywords, location, level of influence, number of followers and many more. CRS used these to find “finance industry opinion formers” from SocialBro’s database of over 100M active users. From here they were able to follow the ones they wanted to and for the ones that they did not, they could add them to lists enabling them to see what they are posting without having to follow them. CRS also made use of tags and notes, adding tags to these users to make searching for them instant in the future. Once following these users (or monitoring them in a list), CRS could then interact with them when they see the opportunity by replying to their posts with answers or suggesting content they may find useful.

Another way that CRS kept track of what users in their field were saying was to monitor hashtags that are specific to the industries that form their client base. This allowed them to take part in discussions which increased their presence or to analyze those users tweeting the hashtag to find ways to target them.

STATS AND INSIGHTS

Darren (a self-confessed statistics nerd) particularly likes the stats and insights SocialBro provides him with. He was able to filter CRS’ current followers against set criteria and analyze the stats and insights provided to search for and identify new potential followers who fit the appropriate profile. Knowing what works for their current followers provides them with ideas on how to target specific messages to users who fit the same criteria. All of the stats are easy to read on a clear dashboard and can even be emailed to him for when he is unable to access a computer and has to rely on a mobile device.

CRS found SocialBro extremely useful when it came to keeping tabs on the competition. The ability to analyze competitors’ Twitter accounts means that they can see stats and insights about their followers providing them with users to target and the ability to compare their community against their own to determine how they could be targeting people differently.

OPTIMIZING THEIR TWEETS

Once they had expanded their Twitter Community, CRS made use of SocialBro’s Best Time to Tweet Report to make sure that their tweets reached the

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Strategies

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maximum audience possible and were therefore most effective. SocialBro allows users to create a BTTT report for either their followers in general or a custom report. CRS was able to create a custom BTTT report for their followers that fit the criteria of “finance industry opinion formers” to determine when would be most beneficial to tweet links to their relevant posts. Similarly they created reports for their different types of followers who would most respond to different types of Tweets. SocialBro has recently integrated with HootSuite so now CRS are able to schedule their tweets in advance according to the information provi-ded to them from their BTTT report.

IMPROVING THEIR CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT

One thing that has always been particularly important to CRS is being responsive as they pride themselves on providing good and personal customer service. There is a number of ways that SocialBro has helped them to do this. SocialBro works as a powerful custo-mer relationship management tool. Every business out there has people tweeting about them, even those who do not use Twitter. By using SocialBro to perform advanced searches, CRS are able to look for people Tweeting about them and reply/ respond accordingly. The latest interactions section of SocialBro enables them to see who is tweeting to or about them in real time and allows them to reply directly to clients or contacts or thank someone for a retweet immediately (something which is important to CRS). The “I influen-ce” section shows CRS all of the people who have mentioned them or asked them a question. From here they can assign tags and notes to remember to come back to people if they are busy at the time or need to find out some extra information. By clicking on a user in this section they can see all of the past interactions that they have had with them, meaning they can keep

track of what they have replied/ told them in the past. The “new followers” section shows CRS who has recently followed them allowing them to send a personal welcome message, something that is important to CRS what with them being in a people industry and having a strong personal service philosophy. Both of the sections mentioned above offer the option of filtering by date, something that is useful if for example Darren is away for a few days he can go back to those dates to see who followed or mentioned CRS and respond accordingly.

MONITOR THEIR EVOLUTION

Once CRS had started using SocialBro to increase their reach and the quality of their Twitter communi-ty they then started using it as a way of monitoring the evolution of their Twitter activity to make sure they are achieving what they set out to do. The dashboard allows them to clearly see the growth in their Twitter community, the increase in their interac-tions and keep tabs on the quality of their Twitter community, which as a B2B company is especially important. For example as they are targeting profes-sionals one way of determining the quality of their community is to look at the chart showing what percentage of their followers have URLs in their bios (as companies tend to have links to their websites in their bios). CRS found that SocialBro produces actionable results which clearly show what is and isn’t working allowing them to react dynamically. For example styles of tweets that receive most retweets or replies can be used to create future tweets, allowing them to keep impro-ving their Twitter activity.

Strategies

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CRS have said that SocialBro has enabled them to use Twitter better and smarter and they predict that this will keep improving. They have gained new followers and increased the quality of their Twitter Community as well as being able to better target and engage with it’s members. They have always stressed the importance of customer service to their business and they have utilized SocialBro to impro-ve their responsiveness via Twitter. Ultimately using SocialBro has enabled them to utilize Twitter as a key part of their digital marketing programme and within a budget meaning they receive a good return on investment.

Results