The Obligatory Blog

A Twitter Strategy

I wrote this summary on possible ways to use Twitter for commercial benefit for a particular company. It's not a hugely indepth report, and to some extent is often speculative - but I thought I would put it out and share should anyone find it a useful basis to think about how they are using Twitter.

I’m increasingly convinced by Twitter as a means of generating traffic, this industry report from Hitwise shows the massive increase in visitor traffic (bolded text my own) :

One consequence of its phenomenal growth is that Twitter has become a key source of traffic to other websites. During May 2009 Twitter was the 30th biggest source of traffic for other sites in the UK, accounting for 1 in every 350 visits to a typical website. Over half of this traffic (55.9%) is sent to other content-driven online media sites, such as social networks, blogs, and news and entertainment websites. However, only 9.5% of Twitter’s downstream traffic is sent to transactional websites (i.e. travel, business and finance sites, plus online retailers). By contrast, Google UK (the country’s biggest search engine and source of traffic to other websites) sends 30.7% of its traffic to transactional sites, while for Facebook (the UK’s most popular social network), the figure is 14.7%.

This suggests company X would not benefit from being on Twitter with the strategy of directing users directly back to your website. However, there is no reason we can’t adapt your online presence and strategy on Twitter to still benefit from the community.

Over half of this traffic (55.9%) is sent to other content-driven online media sites, such as social networks, blogs, and news and entertainment websites.

Rather than direct a user to a specific product page on an ecommerce site, this suggests you would have more success directing them to a blog post focusing on assistance and opinion rather than direct sale.

You could also engage directly on Twitter, simply building relationships and allowing users to then search you out independently having built up a positive impression of your service.

Also:

The third party website that has benefited most from Twitter’s success is Twitpic, a service which allows users to upload photos and pictures to their Twitter profiles. The site was the biggest recipient of UK traffic from Twitter during May, picking up 1 in every 13 downstream visits from the social network. UK Internet visits to Twitpic have increased 250 fold over the last 12 months, and it is now the third most popular photo website in the UK behind Flickr and Photobucket.

Again, you could utilise Twitpic to upload images of suggested products to users and interact with them online with a ‘soft-sell’ approach.

The key to having a successful Twitter presence is to engage the community. Twitter is a great viral marketing channel, and for many users the aim is to have their story ‘retweeted’ – i.e. passed on by other users – as many times as possible. Although all of the newspapers have multiple ‘official’ feeds, these tend to be bland and have very low ‘retweet’ rates. Where journalists themselves are ‘tweeting’ themselves and engaging with the Twitter community, they typically have more success in creating viral stories.

The above shows you will not benefit from simply having an account and broadcasting updates on product ranges. Instead you need to engage with users who are talking about your your products.

Examples: Follow any Twitter users who are in your customer demographic (decorators, builders, self-builders, interior designers etc). Chances are they will follow you back, and also make it easy to see any time they Tweet about a project, where we can pro-actively reply with suggestions.

You could also be in the habit of regularly searching Twitter for key phrases (decorating, painting, etc). If someone Tweets ‘Off to shop for paint’ – that is an ideal opportunity to reply with a comment or suggestion about what to look for.

The drawback is the commitment requirement. It can’t be ringfenced into set time slots each day. To really make it work, 1 or more people need to have Twitter open in the background all day (and preferably weekends too) and be replying and posting comments throughout the day for real-time interactivity with potential customers (and even providing customer service to existing customers).

John Cowen runs Mekonta - a web design business in Exeter. If you liked this article, subscribe.