How to plan for Twitter media

I was in Minneapolis last week for a session for marketers hosted by Twitter. I had two big takeaways:

1. The stats

• Twitter has 100 million active users. Over 600,000 new accounts are added daily.
• Not everyone tweets; 40% of users just listen. They're seeing one billion tweets produced every 4.5 days.
• Over half of Twitter's active user base is on mobile. Enhancements like the upcoming iOS5 integration will drive further mobile usage along with overall user base growth. It's a bit premature to think that Facebook will become the web.

2. You need to plan.

Twitter offers three paid products: Promoted Tweets, Trends, and Accounts. Using these effectively requires a bit more than throwing some budget out there to see what clicks. Campaign integration is key to making spend work and brands need to plan ahead to maximize value.

For example, let's say you sponsor a big sporting event and assume you already have a Twitter account.

Preparing for your event, you'll want to build your follower base - this number constitutes your initial reach, the bigger the better. Promoted Accounts help build your base and Twitter's research shows that these followers are stickier than organic follows. Offline, you should be promoting your Twitter handle in stores and on packaging and other portable materials that consumers can take with them and look you up later.

Leading up to your event, you should be engaging with your ecosystem on an ad-hoc basis to drive organic impressions. In addition, your content calendar should drive conversation topics and you can use Promoted Tweets to target messages to specific demographics, driving customer acquisition. Although consumers always love to hate advertising, research shows that Promoted Tweets don't spur higher unfollow rates than other tweet types. You should be tracking and optimizing message efficacy, monitoring elements like content and daypart. 

On the day of your event, you'll want to use a Promoted Trend to drive traffic. The text of that tweet should contain a link leading to a monetizable consumer action. Brands need to plan ahead on this one, as inventory is limited and can sell out. The last thing you want is a competitor purchasing a key hashtag that diverts attention away from you - think about how Pizza Hut generated massive social media attention during the last Super Bowl despite Papa John's position as official sponsor.

The infrastructure to support all of this includes a communications workflow and trained staff to support consumer engagement before, during, and after your event. Links that you include in messages should facilitate tracking, whether through URL shortener, landing page, or other method, ideally integrated with your existing analytics platform.

This advice might seem familiar, even too simple for some. But many brands still approach Twitter as a domain limited to 1-1 direct engagement, missing opportunities for valuable one-to-many reach. Increasing brand awareness on Twitter takes more than "let's get retweeted by someone with a lot of followers." Instead, brands should plan on channel integration to maximize advertising investments.

 

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Comments

[Peter Kim]

There is no magic number of Twitter followers, Facebook subscribers, or Google+ connections. Business goals should guide a brand's focus on quantity vs quality.

[Kimberkimbrough]

"Preparing for your event, you'll want to build your follower base - this number constitutes your initial reach, the bigger the better."

I am wondering what is the magic number of followers. Many companies, due to the niche, simply do not reach over 2,000 followers. Big and consumer popular corporations (Nike, Pepsi, Apple) could do this with ease.

But companies who do not fit the popular profile, should really consider the value of using any of Twitter's paid products. For example, a local dentist may not benefit.

Or, am I missing something here?
THANX! :)
http://www.kimberlykimbrough.com