What is Twitter?
Twitter is an online social networking service and micro blogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based messages of up to 140 characters known as tweet.
The more people who follow you on Twitter, the more influence and networking opportunities you have. Thus, it makes sense to try and build a following.
Twitter Insights:
- 500 million registered as of 2012
- 340 million tweets daily
- handling over 1.6 billion search queries per day
- Twitter is ranked as one of the ten-most-visited websites worldwide by Alexa’s web traffic analysis.
Users: Mostly used by
- Professionals like CEO, Directors, managers (updating what is new)
- Companies for traffic and lead generation (branding & customer interaction)
- People of 25+ age for latest news
Functions of Twitter
- Trending topics: currently discussed by twitter users (left side)
- Search: allows to search people geographically, question askers, phrases used (top header)
- Retweet: credit to the twitter user for sharing informational news
- Mention: direct interaction to particular twitter profile (@ symbol)
- #tag: Keyword through which you want to be searched (# symbol)
- Message: can send direct offline message to your followers
- URL Shortner: helps to short lengthy URLs
- Image Sharing: allows to share image
- Video sharing: allows o share videos
- Twitter list: Segregation of twitter profile based on interest
- Verified Accounts: In June 2008, Twitter launched a verification program, allowing celebrities to get their accounts verified. Symbol denotes account is verified.
Benefits of Twitter in business
- Connecting with customers: helps to connect anyone exist on twitter
- Branding: Company profile helps in branding
- Customer Feedback: customer can directly approach
- Marketing: it is easy to market you service in front of your followers
- News: latest news related to industry increases followers and make you expert of your field
- Give away coupon codes and promotions: for attracting current users
- Twitter is Viral: promotional tweets (paid)
- Spying on competition: can take the competitors business if they are not able to handle customer negative feedback
- Increase Sales: help to Increase sales and make PROFIT. Dell is one of the company that have increase their sales on twitter that was $6.5 million in sales as reported at mashable
- Brand Loyalty: a satisfied customer will always be loyal to you.
Twitter allows you to follow anyone, including strangers. This is helpful when you target potential customers.
One of my client for whom I worked on twitter was a Law Firm. Here are some statistics of its twitter account:
Law Firm on Twitter:
Most of the Law Firm Followers are by profession
- CEO
- Business owners
- Attorneys
- Law Firms
- Journalist
- Marketing people
- Student
- Legal News site
Example of Campaign which has been driven for Law Firm:
Twitter referral traffic for one page lawfirm/publications/ on 25 March 2013 when they published the article on Sanjay Dutt got punishment by Supreme Court.
Stat of 25th March 2013
Total Twitter Traffic: 71 visitors
Average Pages per visit: 1.77
Average time per visit: 00:00:52
New visit: 92.86%
Bounce Rate: 8.57%
Tweet was:
Why Sanjay Dutt was punished by the Supreme Court of India? know the facts http://bit.ly/ZmRl6B
As Sanjay Dutt was trending topic at that day, I targeted all people who were having good followers and were searching for Sanjay Dutt at that time and mention them in tweet.
Paid Promotion in Twitter
Through twitter we can promote tweets and twitter profile. Twitter ads are best for a few common marketing objectives, including:
- Promotions: Recommended for time sensitive events
- Brand awareness: Allow advertisers exposure to potentially new audience
- Followers: Pay-per-follow to grow the follower base and leverage this audience for future promotions and dialogue.
Types of Advertisement:
One can do two types of paid promotion on twitter:
- Promoted Tweets – This is where Twitter either automatically selects your most engaging tweets or you can select them yourself manually and they will display them at the top of your follower’s timelines for them to see. You set the budget for how much you are willing to spend per day and also a range for how much you are willing to spend per “click.” You are then charged each time a user clicks (Re-Tweets, Favorites, Replies or clicks to your profile). Twitter also allows you to limit your promoted tweets to certain geographical regions of your choice.
- Promoted Accounts – This feature is used in order to increase your follower count. Twitter will display your account prominently in the “Who to Follow” section to users that would most likely be interested in your account. Once again you can limit to what geographical areas you want to target and you only pay once a user follows you.
- Promoted Trends – Promoted trends are featured next to the user’s timeline on twitter.com among the organic Twitter trends and are tailored for users based on location and who they follow. Ads appear at the top of the trending topics list. Promoted Trends are currently in beta with a small selection of advertisers.
Budget and bidding on twitter
We can set our budget per day as well as bid per click according to own choice. Here is an average pricing details but actual price will depend on campaign and its competition.
- Promoted Account ads are priced on a cost-per-follower basis with advertisers only paying for new followers gained. The recommended bid to start is $.50 to at least max of $2.50.
- Promoted tweets use cost-per-click pricing and Twitter recommends $.50 to at least max of $1.50.
Written
on 2014 February, 25