Turning Up Your Twitter Tactics #smxlondon
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Turning Up Your Twitter Tactics #smxlondon

16th May 2013

Twitter has fast evolved to become a key element in anyone’s social media strategy. The landscape has changed though and the days of simply pushing out 140 character messages in the hope of generating new traffic to your site are long gone. Nowadays we as digital marketers, have to take various considerations into account i.e tweet time, frequency, re-tweets as well as the authority of those that are re-tweeting. Twitter has launched various new service enhancements such as its expanding Twitter promotion program and as Twitter cards. The session’s focus was on techniques and strategies to truly get the best out of Twitter.

The speaker panel consisted of:

Mike Essex, Online Marketing Manager at Koozai

Mike Essex

 

 

 

 

 

 

‘The Death of: Corporate Brands and Personal Brands’

How people see social media has changed massively over time. Nowadays we think of corporate and personal accounts meaning the lines are often blurring. Online the social and corporate brand collide. The reality is that there’s an overlap between the two.  The question is how can we fix this?

Think of the incident where a teacher was fired based on tweets from her personal account . Even though her tweets showed her in a revealing outfit socializing with friends is that reason enough to fire someone? This shows that her personal life has massively affected her professional life. Keep in mind that  tweets are here to stay online and you cannot make them disappear.

Nowadays teenagers and children grow up in this new environment and their online social behavior will have an impact on their professional careers.  We all did silly things when we were young but now  our online identities are here to stay and if you are not careful they might come to haunt you eventually.

So what’s the solution? Pick a thought leader to be in charge of your Twitter accounts and not an intern – as it’s not worth the risk.  Mike provided a Cineworld example where a customer mentioned the high ticket prices and the person in charge of Cineworld’s Twitter account replied along the lines ‘it’s a free economy’ as you can imagine that did not go down well. As a result the person in charge of their twitter account was made redundant. One comment basically turned into a large scale problem.

There are various examples of mismatches between brands and employees – something that can easily be prevented.

So how can we embrace this? Mike reckons the new social media is  an ‘everything brand’.  The solution is to provide employee branded accounts. The BBC was one of the first brands to embrace this approach i.e @DavidBondBBC – and a lot of brands have followed since. Another benefit of this approach is that employees feel part of the tribe then, additionally they get new followers by association meaning immediate wider reach.  Further tweeting during the day gets a lot easier resulting in personal brand benefits.

In Koozai’s case over a third of mentions of their brands are thanks to their employees.

There is a fine line though that’s why Koozai have an employee handbook at hand to integrate it into the brand’s and personal culture.  It’s important though to monitor conversations in order to minimize risks. Having a good tool in place is essential though.  Options would be: tweetDeck, Google alerts, Hootsuite, social mention, BrandsEye, trackur, etc….

It’s crucial to determine who owns the account. At Koozai they allow employees to keep their accounts so they are fully and truly dedicated to growing them. Mike gave the example of Phonedog who sued an employee for $370,000 for trying to keep 17000 Twitter followers when he left – so make sure you put that in employees contracts so they know how to use social media and also the consequences.

Organisations still need a main corporate account but remember to make it personal . It can be run by multiple employees but use initials at the end of each tweet.

 

Brent Gleeson, CMO at Internet Marketing Inc.

Brent Gleeson

 

 

 

 

 

 

‘Tuning Up your Twitter Tactics – for Powerful Content Marketing’

Brent kicked off  defining the new buzz term as ‘ using content that is not, at its core, promotional material, but which is interesting or valuable for its won sake’.

Apparently 91% of consumers find costum content useful and 78% believe that organisations providing custom content are interested in building good relationships with them.

So why is it so important? Because 61% of consumers say they feel better about a company that delivers custom content, they are also more likely to buy from that company.

Whereas organisations need to think of how they distribute content. linkedIn currently accounts for 83% whilst Twitter follows closely with 81% and Facebook now accounts for 80%. Brent then went on to provide us with tips to improve our  Twitter content distribution techniques

  • Less is more – keep it short and sweety
  • Replace words with symbols
  • Use the hashtag in the copy instead of at the end
  • Include a call to action
  • Shorten and track the URL through using bit.ly or ow.ly

He also highlighted the importance of thought leadership either through speaking engagements or writing efforts.  If you are a conference speaker make sure you share your slides via Twitter afterwards.  If you have access to data ensure you write white papers and share them with their followers since it’s valuable for them.

Research has shown that fueling thought leadership is the main objective for B2B marketers marketing efforts in 2013 accounting for 56%.

Twitter is probably the most powerful tool to support and distribute content. Additionally it’s a fantastic way for PR outreach strategies since

  • Most journalists are on Twitter
  • Keep it short and sweet
  • You get to learn about them – what are their interests?
  • Allows for better relationship building

Twitter is a great way to learn about them – you can find out if you have interests in common – what are they tweeting about? You can start engaging with them and send direct messages. Tools to help you are: Follower Wonk, MediaonTwitter.com, Seek or shout and Cision.

Brent then went on to provide us with a case study of ‘Couple Resorts’. Their aim was to create a fully integrated campaign to increase revenue from online bookings.

So how did Brent incorporate content marketing to achieve this?

Keyword Strategy

  • Attract early passive audiences and introduced them to Couple Resort brand experience.
  • Direct appeal to their audience (recipe for a healthy marriage)
  • Focus on history – facts of the community
  • Worked with the social team and onsite content contributors to identify priority keywords

Creating content based on strategy

  • Optimized blog posts for keywords
  • Created assets to help gain visibility  – images, videos, infographics, etc.
  • Looked at how pieces performed and optimized

Content Optimization

  • Social teams and content creators work together to recommend priority terms
  • Reviewing the schedule
  • Provide monthly proximity and landing page adjustments based on keyword performance and linked terms with internal architecture using keyword rich text
  • Made sure titles were well optimized for all content: blog posts, press releases, etc…

Social Distribution

  • Distributed new content pieces through Twitter and other social channels with targeted keywords is proximity to the target landing page to help convey relevance in search signals.

The results were brilliant – Twitter became the highest source of traffic and multi channel analytics was used and the average time on site was 31 minutes whilst  they also generated $50,000 worth of room bookings.

 

Jim Yu, CEO at Brightedge

Jim Yu

 

 

 

 

 

‘7 Steps to Take Twitter Campaigns to the Next Level’

Social content is a key priority for marketers in 2013. Understanding the relationship between Twitter and search is a huge area of opportunity. So how do you align the SEO and social team? Key is to create a dialogue between the two.

1)Think keywords – what keywords matter to your audience? SEOs know the keywords and should share that with the social team.

2) Identify keywords trending on Twitter – absolute number of tweets with keywords

3) Prioritize keywords for driving Twitter activity – capitalize on strong trending keywords. Do topics overlap? Consider how many tweets to send out.

4) Map existing pages to trending keywords. SEOs know all about keyword mapping and then refine your keywords

5) Craft your tweets

6) Measure success and tune up your twitter tactics

7) Collaborate – so both SEO and social media teams win

To conclude – align your search and social teams. Listen to Twitter and use it as a fire-hose of data. Identify trends and tab in if possible. Test your practices and learn on an ongoing basis. Integrate your SEO and social efforts and constantly adapt!

The sessions were followed by a short Q&A

Why are you specifically using  Twitter instead of Facebook?

Facebook is perceived as more private. Koozai wouldn’t encourage employees to have clients as Facebook friends, whilst with Twitter it’s far more public so it’s easier to distinguish. The messaging you put on Facebook resonates differently to messaging on Twitter so you would need to cater differently.  Twitter traffic is also quicker transferred to your website instead of coming from Facebook.

How do you feel about people who follow a big number of people – what should the balance be?

The days of ‘if you follow me and I follow you’ are over. Mike uses Twitter lists a lot – to follow journalists for instance because it’s easier to manage. The key is engagement though, only that will drive traffic and conversions.

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Written By
Clarissa is a bilingual Strategic Marketing MA graduate with rounded experience in a number of key marketing disciplines including social media, project management, research and business development. Clarissa is Marketing Graduate at Linkdex.
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