IS TWITTER?

AGENDA

What is Twitter?

What should I tweet about?

Increasing Engagement

Increasing the size of the Community

Customer Service on Twitter

Potential obstacles and how to manage them

Negative feedback & crisis management

Reporting – how to measure your success

Best Practices (cheat sheet)

Twitter and Traffika

WHAT IS TWITTER?

• People sharing information, opinions and conversations, 140 characters at a time.

• Simple platform• Text is main medium• Makes for multiple uses • Different people use it in entirely different ways

WHAT IS TWITTER?

• Launched mid-2006• Cemented social media as a truly ‘mobile’

platform (smartphones, Facebook followed suit)

• Around 50-60 million tweets per day

• Twitter traffic is largely influenced by immediate events - e.g. announcements, shows, awards, news, events

COMPONENTS OF A PROFILEWho you’re followed by

Number of times you’ve been listed

Similar profiles to yours (based on keywords tweeted, location)

Name, Twitter handle and bio

Tweets published

Who you’re following

HOW IS TWITTER USED?

• People connecting with friends

• Businesses connecting with customers

• Governments connecting with citizens

• Astronauts connecting with earth

• Businesses publishing content

• People ‘following their interest’

THE IMMEDIATE EFFECT

PROLIFIC TWITTERERS

Profile Followers (Apr 2011)

@LadyGaga 9,452,797

@justinbieber 8,949,199

@britneyspears 7,506,100

@barackobama 7,444,505

@KimKardashian 7,196,765

@KatyPerry 6,743,980

@aplusk 6,570,052

@TheEllenShow 6,420,857

@taylorswift13 6,021,585

@oprah 5,622,592

TWITTER FOR BUSINESSES

SELECTING THE RIGHT CONTENT

• Refer to your overall business objectives and find/produce content that supports these.

• Find out what your followers are interested in and associate your content with that.

SELECTING THE RIGHT CONTENT

• Which celebrities do they follow? • Which other profiles do they engage with? • What content do they share on their own profile?• Are they interested in real estate, the stock market, food,

travel, rugby?• These trends can influence your brand’s Twitter engagement

strategy• They can also uncover opportunities for your broader

marketing strategy.

INCREASING ENGAGEMENT

• Make sure the content is likeable and shareable (what would

you share on your profile?)

• Ask for engagement (often overlooked)

• Make sure the content is topical and relevant to the audience

• Make your Twitter profile

approachable by responding

to and sharing content from

within your community

GROWING THE COMMUNITY

• Follow profiles and brands which have similar audiences to yours• Doesn’t have to be in the same industry (e.g.

@VirginBlue follows @Mick_Fanning)• Focus the content on Word-Of-Mouth sharing• What would people want to talk about at the water-

cooler? “did you hear...” stories

GROWING THE COMMUNITY• Publish content relevant to the audience you want to

attract

• Growing a rich and loyal following is better than generating a ‘large’ following.• in some cases less is better• be there for your followers

• Growing your community requires long term commitment, particularly for brands• There is a tipping point, but don’t hold your breath

CUSTOMER SERVICE ON TWITTER

• Be a good listener• Monitor and listen all the time (there are tools to help

you do this)

• Listen to the problems, opinions, thoughts of your followers

• React and respond quickly and accordingly

• Overcome their obstacles / pain points – give them an excuse to like your brand

RESPONDING TO MENTIONS

• Be genuine and honest in your responses (if you don’t know the answer immediately, let them know you will respond later)

• Responses to @-replies should be made a priority, particularly if they are positive.• Think of them as someone holding up their hand

for a high-five - don’t leave them hanging

RESPONDING TO MENTIONS

• For brand mentions, the response is determined by the nature of the mention

• If it’s a positive mention - respond as soon as possible and try to engage the person further - ask them a question, ask for their opinion, can you help further?

• Draw attention to it.

• Negative or derogatory mentions often require more measured responses. Avoid knee-jerk or defensive reactions

• Apologise only if you are at fault for a mistake - lots of apologies looks bad on your Twitter profile

POTENTIAL OBSTACLES

• Lack of time to manage the account• Automate as much as possible (but don’t over-

automate)• schedule tweets• set up email alerts for monitoring• set up phone/sms alerts for mentions

• Allocate specific times of the day to respond to mentions• If you work to an 8 hour response time, schedule

15mins every few hours to respond and direct issues to the right people• Be diligent with responses – they can pile up

POTENTIAL OBSTACLES• Sounding too “corporate”• Think of it as a telephone call between you and your

customers, • Use a conversational tone • try to keep it relaxed

• On the other hand avoid being too informal• Bear in mind all your different followers and their values (personal

and cultural).• Don’t tweet anything you wouldn’t say in front of a crowd

• Remember, you don’t have to ‘sound’ like your audience.• Don’t be the Dad with his cap sideways• Maintain your authority

• Consider it as a way to extend your brand’s voice - be kind and helpful

NEGATIVE FEEDBACK

• For negative tweets, respond as soon as possible• Turn a negative into a positive• Try to empower the person by giving them

choices, e.g. “We’d be happy to resolve this for you... would you prefer us to email or call?”

• Humanise the assistance by identifying exactly who will be contacting the person, e.g. “Manesh will give you a call tomorrow morning”

NEGATIVE FEEDBACK

• Turning a negative into a positive

• It generally doesn’t take much to resolve small grievances

• One of the main pain-points for customers is the communication barrier between them and you.

• Sometimes people just want a little attention

NEGATIVE MENTIONS

• Inflammatory or abusive tweets (racist, sexist, abusive language)• No need to respond to these people• Remember, the content will not appear on your feed

and it’s unlikely that other people will engage them in relation to your brand.

CRISIS MANAGEMENT

• Dealing with a barrage of negative tweets• Things have to go pretty wrong for this to happen - proper

management will diffuse problems before they get too big • If it does happen, remember it’s very difficult to reason

with a mob.• Generally the best course of action is to let the issue run

its course, formulate a response and reply when the anger has died down

• Determine at which point you should involve the PR team• if possible come up with some benchmarks, or at which

point it becomes a ‘crisis’.• e.g. 20 negative responses on the same topic

WHAT MAKES TWITTER TERRIBLE?

• Companies trying the hard-sell• Twitter is not a shouting board for your brand• Think about a TV ad for a carpet sale and do the opposite• Sale messages are one-way - Twitter is two-way

• Talk less about your products, and more about the community

• Unless you know your community only wants to hear sale messages

• Brands and people who only talk about themselves

• As a general rule, around a quarter of your tweets should mention the brand

• The other 75% should be general interest content focused on getting shares and replies from your community.

WHAT MAKES TWITTER TERRIBLE?

WAT MAKES TWITTER TERRIBLE?

• Brands who are absent• Those which treat Twitter as a broadcast platform don’t

respond• Twitter gives brands a chance to listen to and talk with

their customers• So why wouldn’t you do it?

• It’s easy to over-automate - pluging in a number of RSS feeds (using HootSuite) which will automatically publish content to the feed. • This should generally be avoided but if so make sure someone is

there to respond

WHAT MAKES TWITTER TERRIBLE?

• Overtweeting• Generally 4 to 6 outbound tweets per day is

acceptable• Too many and you block up people’s feeds• Too few and your brand will lack presence• Try and space them out during the day

• Lack of tracking and measurement• You can’t improve on what you don’t measure.• Define metrics like clicks, followers, replies,

ReTweets, website traffic and website sales to measure the success of your efforts

• Gather the data then take action

MEASURING SUCCESS

• How do you know that what you’re doing is working?• Generally, an increase in followers is a good indication

that you are attracting people to your profile• Through UTM-tagging (tagging all in-bound links to your

website) you will be able to measure the amount of traffic generated by Twitter• From here you can determine the quality of this traffic

through Analytics• For an e-commerce site, this is where you work out the

REAL value of your Twitter followers.• Track the number of clicks through HootSuite• there is analytics behind the ow.ly url shortener

MEASURING SUCCESS

• Using a third party monitoring application like BuzzNumbers will provide detailed analytics on the number of mentions of you, your brand and its competitors• Will give insights into the sentiment of the mentions

(positive, neutral or negative)

• For our clients Buzz and sentiment is generally reported on Monthly

• Shorter time-frames can be used to track specific tactical campaigns, e.g. launch of a TVC or a Press Release

BEST PRACTICES• Share

• Photos, video, links, information• Behind-the-scenes info about you, your people and your brand• First-look images / video

• Be a good listener• Monitor comments about your company and competitors• Listen to what your community says, about everything (not just your business)• Get to know your most active tweeters (through the right nurturing they will become your

advocates)• Ask questions

• Find out what they want, then give it to them• Respond in real time

• Doesn’t have to be immediate, but don’t leave them hanging• Demonstrate leadership

• You are the authority• Give your followers access to the bigger superannuation picture

• Reward your influencers• ReTweet and publicly reply to high quality content from your followers

• Establish your brand’s voice• Friendly, helpful, approachable, honest

CHEAT SHEET

Before each tweet, ask the following questions:• Does the content abide by your brand’s content

policies?• Is there an avenue for engagement … does it

pose a question?• Does it add value?• Are you being honest?• Does it have a positive sentiment?• Does it allow room for RTs or re-posts? (110

chars)• Speak it out loud… does it make sense?

TRAFFIKA AND TWITTER• We:• Recommend Twitter• Don’t recommend Twitter (unsuitable business, lack of

resources, etc)• Advise and consult on Twitter strategies• Schedule Twitter content• Optimise content distribution• Use Twitter ourselves to…

• Publish content• Answer questions• Build on the Traffika brand community• Build the Traffika community• Extend the Traffika experience• Generate leads

ANY QUESTIONS?Ask us in the comments below