January 27, 2010

• Why Twitter is a great branding tool

According to Brandchannel, the number of visitors to Twitter hasn’t changed all that much since June. Still, about 20 million people each month check in to Twitter to tweet or to read. Has Twitter peaked or should you still be considering how to integrate Twitter into your branding strategy?

Personally, I have a horror of Twitter’s witterers - those who tweet compulsively about their every movement. However I have become a huge fan of Twitter as a branding tool over the past year and here’s why:

1. Twitter helps you track your industry trends in real-time

Find all the visionaries, thought-leaders, key influencers, experts and media channels in your market sector and follow them. A 5-minute flick through your twitter homepage each day over a cup of coffee (as I do) will keep you in touch at a high-level with what’s happening. It is quite simply the only way to keep on top of the tidal wave of information that is out there.

2. Twitter helps you to really understand your customers

Find opinion-leaders in your market and follow them. If they are very active twitter-users, they will tweet regularly about the details of their lives. No better way to gain insight into how they think and what is important to them. If you’re lucky and they like your product, they might even tweet about you to their followers.

3. Twitter helps you to track your brand

Just search for your brand on Twitter and see what real people, in real time are saying about you. Of course, you then need to decide what to do about it… I’m a big fan of responding directly to any complaints and taking them offline. Convert that person and you’ve not only done the right thing, you might have created a new ambassador for your brand. Of course, you can also use Google alert.

4. Twitter helps you to say a gentle hello to prospective customers, especially if you’re an online business

I have a personal twitter account under the name “nonsumers”. I use it to log all of the ethical products that I buy as part of a personal project to live more sustainably without the hairshirt and ashes. I don’t actively seek followers, it’s really just a project for myself and I will look back at year end and see how we as a family have changed our consumption patterns. However each time I tweet about a product category, I will pick up a new follower. It’s invariably a company selling the type of products I just tweeted about. To me, it’s a gentle and non-invasive way for businesses to put themselves on my radar. I can choose to follow them in return if I wish, but I pretty much always check out their websites and will bookmark the ones I’m interested in. (oh and if you’re interested, you can follow me here)

5. Twitter helps you to get your message out to lots of people very quickly

For those who are unfamiliar with Twitter, it allows you to retweet other people’s tweets out to your followers. It’s the same thing as forwarding on an email to everyone in your address book. So if you have something interesting to say and your followers have lots of followers, you can get your message out there very quickly. Be aware though that people will only retweet information that’s new, interesting and of relevance to their own followers. Today, Damien Mulley kickstarted an experiment on twitter asking people to tweet their business elevator statement followed by #biztweet (this means that all tweets containing #biztweet will be gathered together by twitter). Within a couple of hours, people were retweeting his request and elevator statements (including ours) were flooding in. Nice profile-building for Damien Mulley.

6. Twitter helps you to tell the story of the people behind the brand

Websites tend to be a bit more formal, blog posts by their nature tend to be topic-specific, tweets on the other hand can be friendly in tone and far more varied in content. You should be able to tell what really interests a business by looking at their twitter page. It should be a reflection of what they read, what they do and what they care about. It’s a great way to communicate the personality behind your business. People worry about having small numbers of followers but that is just one way of measuring the effectiveness of Twitter.

Be warned, anyone can set up a twitter account in your business name so whether you are going to take the plunge or not, you should immediately set up a twitter account for your business.  By the way, when you get started be sure to come and say hello to us @wearethreesixty

Siobhan O'Dwyer - Strategy

siobhan@threesixty.ie