Yes, and . . .
Can you use Twitter Cards for lead generation, sales, and audience-building?
Yes, and . . .
Can you use Twitter to view and share television highlights from partners?
Yes, and . . .
I think you get the point. Twitter has evolved far beyond its original 140 characters into a real-time reflection of the brands, content, events, ideas, music, news, and people shaping cultures around the world. Its website and mobile app now accommodate audio and video, making the 140-character tweet more of a springboard to rich content than a destination itself.
While smaller than Facebook in terms of total users, Twitter can often be more influential because:
Twitter handles (ex. @jkrohrs) have become the de facto shorthand for public identity online. Facebook has no similar shorthand.
Twitter is viewed as a fully public, broadcast medium, whereas Facebook is viewed more as a semi-private, personal medium.
Twitter’s public platform attracts INFLUENCERS who gravitate to Twitter in hopes of gaining more FOLLOWERS and, therefore, more influence.
If nothing else, your company should be on Twitter to enable Twitter users to link to your profile. Without a Twitter handle, CUSTOMERS who want to express positive sentiment about your brand do so by just mentioning your name. When you have a Twitter handle, they can link to your Twitter profile, and the FOLLOWERS who see their tweet can learn more information about your company. (See Figure 11.1.)
FIGURE 11.1 A Twitter Handle Provides One-Click Access to Your Profile so That SEEKERS, AMPLIFIERS, and FOLLOWERS Can Quickly Learn Who You Are via Your Profile or Linked Website
Of course, Twitter’s real value isn’t found in merely maintaining a profile. The real value comes from building proprietary audiences of FOLLOWERS and AMPLIFIERS that extend your brand’s reach at zero cost. To do this, however, you must use Twitter to do more than just promote your company—you must serve CUSTOMERS, engage FOLLOWERS, and celebrate AMPLIFIERS. Let’s take a look at the reasons for each.
Serve CUSTOMERS
If you need a reason to monitor your brand mentions on Twitter, just Google: “customer service nightmares on Twitter.” The results will curl your hair (or straighten it, as the case may be). Failure to monitor and respond to customer service complaints on Twitter is akin to not going to the doctor to deal with a greenstick fracture of your leg; it isn’t gonna get better on its own.
The good news, however, is that most Twitter users view the channel as a last resort—that is, they only vent on Twitter if they’ve either exhausted all other official channels or it’s the only one available in the moment. However, once consumers do turn to Twitter with an issue, 42 percent of them expect a response from your company within one hour.2 Thus, to keep Twitter a viable channel for Proprietary Audience Development, you must first make sure that your CUSTOMERS are well-served—and that means proactively monitoring and responding to customer service issues on Twitter as you would anywhere else.
BRAND TO EMULATE: JetBlue (@JetBlue), which has the fastest Twitter response time of a brand with over 1 million FOLLOWERS (13 minutes or less).3
Engage FOLLOWERS
As of this writing, Twitter does not have anything comparable to Facebook’s algorithm to filter the tweets FOLLOWERS see based on the degree of prior engagement with the sender’s content. However, Twitter is rumored to be considering such a move. This isn’t at all surprising, since just following a few hundred people can quickly turn your Twitter feed into a waterfall of information that few people have the time to fully read.
Regardless of how Twitter evolves, your objective must be to stand out from the crowd by being a brand that engages FOLLOWERS. Whether within the desktop app, mobile app, or via email, Twitter notifies users when they are mentioned by others. This not only raises your profile; it gives that individual FOLLOWER a reason to reengage with you and potentially amplify your message now and in the future.
AGNECY TO EMULATE: NASA (@NASA), which engages all manner of FOLLOWERS, PARTNERS, and AMPLIFIERS via its Twitter account—something surprising for a governmental agency.
Celebrate AMPLIFIERS
The greatest compliment you can pay anyone on Twitter is to retweet them. That single action transforms you from a mere FOLLOWER or SEEKER into an AMPLIFIER—while also generating Earned Media for the person you retweet. This may seem counterintuitive; after all, it is your company that is hoping to create AMPLIFIERS and gain Earned Media. However, one must never forget that Twitter is a social medium. As such, it rewards human behaviors that would similarly be rewarded offline.
Think of it this way: Are you more likely to loan money to the friend who helped you yesterday or the one who asks you for money every week? Unless you’re a fiscal sadist, you reward the first friend. Similarly, AMPLIFIERS are more inclined to amplify those brands that amplify them. There’s a sort of unspoken digital prestige in having a brand retweet you—a strange shiver of excitement that a company values something you created. So, if you want to inspire more AMPLIFIERS on Twitter, make sure your company becomes one itself.