A recent sempo.org blog¹ describes the effectiveness of Twitter as a means building brand awareness: “With hundreds of thousands of new accounts created each day, Twitter is arguably one of the most powerful tools for increasing brand awareness. As the second-largest social network, it reaches millions of people every second with 400 million tweets a day.”

The blog continues: “By building a presence on Twitter, your customers will make a personal connection with your brand; this will lend to your business’s credibility and trustworthiness.” However, opportunities for constructive engagement were being missed: “Research indicates 56% of customer tweets to companies are being ignored.”

The BBC Report² coinciding with the Twitter flotation asked the question “How does Twitter make money?” The answer was mostly by advertising, accounting for approx 85% of revenues. There is a range of opportunities for business, including:

• Promoted tweets: your regular tweets are provided with the added bonus of reaching both current and potential followers you wish to target
• Promoted accounts: allowing businesses to get in front of people with similar profiles to your target followers, segmented in ways such as geographic location, interests and gender
• Promoted trends: Allows users to interact in the same way as a trending topic and to click on the promoted trend to see all tweets containing the trending hashtag or trending terms

However, a major benefit is that businesses can successfully grow their following and presence on Twitter organically with the right engagement strategies. A range of clever ideas are highlighted at beeliked.com³ such as the Domino’s Pizza #letsdolunch campaign, offering pizza price reductions directly correlated to the number of tweets received.

Twitter can help to make businesses user-friendly and approachable. An option such as setting up a TweetChat - setting up a scheduled online discussion with followers using a given hashtag reference - can expand the engagement process exponentially. The key to maximising benefits is to maintain a consistent presence and the research statistic showing 56% of customer tweets being unanswered represents a huge opportunity lost.

BBI Brandboost runs successful Twitter campaigns for clients in a range of industry sectors. Contact us on 01494 452600, by email or through the Live Chat function on our website to discuss ideas for effective focused Twitter strategies.

1. “Social Media and your customers: Increasing Brand Awareness through Twitter” http://blog.sempo.org/2013/08/social-media-and-your-customers-increasing-brand-awareness-through-twitter/
2. “How does Twitter Make Money?” http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-24397472
3. “6 UK Twitter campaigns to learn from” http://beeliked.com/social-media-buzz/6-uk-twitter-campaigns-to-learn-from/