Twitter Marketing Effectiveness

Written by: Gary Horsman

How Does Twitter Fit into Your Marketing?

Twitter As A Marketing Awareness Tool

If you are like many marketers, you are often confused about what part of your marketing is working and what part is not. You may even be confused about something that appears to be working but you cannot really measure by how much.

Join the club!

Here is some advice on how to better understand and therefore realize the value of Twitter as a marketing awareness tool. Part of your confusion may be because you are trying to measure every aspect of your marketing in the same way. By using the same performance metrics for every marketing tool you use may (and often does) lead to confusion.

Twitter & Marketing Awareness

Let’s examine Twitter from a marketing awareness perspective. I have found Twitter to be very effective at helping to make someone aware of the existence of something. If someone is not even aware of you or your business, then this is a guarantee that they will not engage with you. Therefore, to have a set of metrics that relate to Twitter and awareness is how to gauge its effectiveness and to reduce your confusion.

Twitter is an exceptional awareness tool. Therefore, measure your performance using it as an awareness tool. Define performance metrics specifically to measure the performance of your marketing awareness activity on Twitter.

A Big Mistake

Someone decides to use Twitter as a marketing tool but they associated it not with awareness but rather sales. A business needs sales – sales are vital. What I want you to consider is that there are no sales without awareness first and you need to measure your performance on Twitter from the perspective of awareness.

Awareness of your . . .

• Existence
• Expertise
• Value and customer-centric approach
• Depth of knowledge and expertise and willingness to share, or even . . .
• Your fun nature

It would be a mistake to measure a tweet, for example, on how well it performed relative to your sales conversion metrics. Twitter is much more effective as a marketing awareness tool not as a sales conversion tool.

Twitter for Awareness – Some Examples

Blogger

You write a blog post. Tweet about it. It makes sense – a great deal of sense! Use Twitter to bring people to your blog to read the post.

Use Twitter to make people aware.

Real Estate Agent

Imagine you are a real estate agent and have a gorgeous new listing. You should absolutely tweet about it to make people aware of this excellent property. Tweet with a wonderful image and a link which brings people directly to the listing on your website. More people will become aware of your new listing. They may follow the link to learn more and may even visit other listings similar to the listing of the original tweet.

The homeowner will appreciate the exposure which may generate more referrals for you. Other area property owners may visit your Twitter feed and become more aware of your expertise and marketing skill. You may become known as the go-to real estate agent in the area!

Now that’s good marketing!

Author

Perhaps you are an author and want more people to be aware of you and your book (or books). People are often online looking for things that interest them. People certainly use Twitter in this manner. It’s part of what people do on Twitter.

People use Twitter to find items of interest and to see what others are displaying and how people are commenting and sharing. When used this way, Twitter is effectively a search engine. You can use Twitter to make people aware of you and your book.  How will people be able to purchase your book if they do not know about it?

People who love books are always looking for books – make them aware of your book.

A note of caution . . .

You do not want to always be promoting (making people aware) of your greatness and the greatness of your blog posts, real estate listings or books. People may get a bit bored hearing about how great you are. People may get the idea that you may be a bit too pushy.

1. Make your Twitter feed more interesting by curating the wonderful content of others that are closely associated with your topic. This helps you as you do not have to create all the content presented in your feed.
2. Create tweets that relate to your business, product or your special interest that add value but that are not specifically about what you want to promote.

Real Estate – A Specific Example

Let’s examine how a real estate agent could use Twitter. You have the listing – this is great. Perhaps your skill and prowess with Twitter even helped you to gain the listing.

Let’s now list some of your areas of expertise and how you could use Twitter to leverage your expertise and promote you, your business, and your listings.

Knowledge of the Area

Create tweets about the area. Show area photos and videos. Showcase, a local business or an area attraction. Curate worthy content of other notable entities in the area.

Your community may have an active Rotary club that tweets about a special event. You can also tweet about this event. Maybe your local history center publishes excellent blog posts about community history. Tweet about these posts. You may have a local arts council that tweets or blogs about area cultural events. Retweet their tweets and tweet about their blog posts.

Use Twitter to make people aware of your expertise on the area. This adds an important richness and depth to your Twitter feed.

Your Skill as a Blogger

You create worthy posts showcasing the area. After all, a home is not a stand-alone item – it exists in a community. Moreover, your blog should not be all about you but rather about the area. As an added benefit of blogging, other area entities may pick up on your excellent blog posts and use them help people gain awareness of the area.  A home is part of a community. Your efforts on area awareness of your community supports your community.

Blog about your community. Let people who may be interested in purchasing a home know what it is like to live and work in your area. Let people know the advantages of raising their family in your community. Inform potential home buyers about places where they can relax and spend their free time.

Use Twitter to make people aware of your blog and blog topics. Create posts that provide valuable educational insights into the community. Your blog has the depth of content and Twitter helps people to be aware of this depth of content.

Your Connections

A successful real estate agent has spent time building and nurturing connections. This time was a valuable investment in your business.

Use Twitter to further enhance and develop your connections. Tweet about the people you are connected with. If they have a blog and it is related to your real estate business in some way, then tweet about it. Use @mentions to promote and make your connections aware that you have done this. You are making them aware of how you support them and they, in turn, are more likely to support you.

Use Twitter to promote your valuable connections. These connections (people and businesses) add value to your community. Make people aware of their value and your value by being connected with them. This demonstrates the benefits of working with you.

Twitter Marketing and Measurements

What do you measure to know if your marketing efforts are effective? I already made the point that if you try to measure Twitter marketing as it relates to sales conversion then you may become confused about its effectiveness, or worse, even come to the wrong conclusion – that Twitter is not effective. You may, therefore, discard this excellent marketing awareness tool. Twitter is a wonderful marketing awareness tool but not so great at sales conversion.

Use Twitter to create and boost awareness. This will reduce your confusion and focus your attention on how to maximize its effectiveness.

Measure traffic from Twitter to your website or blog. Measure the number of page views for a visitor who came from Twitter. An uncomplicated way to measure these two metrics is to use Google Analytics.

Measure the exposure level of your Twitter account. We can conclude that if a tweet receives an exposure of 1,000 then this is 1,000 more opportunities for someone to discover your business and your content. You can see tweet exposure and account exposure right within your Twitter account (Twitter Analytics). Again, this not complicated.

Measure Reciprocating Relationships

Curate and promote the content of others and then measure this activity by the number of shares and comments (engagement). This goes a step beyond awareness and I think of this as awareness of engagement and support. For example, if you start to retweet or share the content of others related to your marketing and they start to notice then there is an awareness that you are supporting them.

Ultimately it is human nature that when you support someone that they will be more likely to support you. With mutual support and perhaps even collaboration remarkable things can happen.

Twitter as a Marketing Tool Conclusions

1. Use and measure your marketing tools for the activity they are designed to do. Twitter is an outstanding marketing awareness tool. Measure your performance on Twitter using awareness metrics. Don’t try to measure it as if it was a sales conversion tool.
2. Establish performance metrics that are proper for the tool and for its purpose. This reduces confusion. For Twitter, define performance metrics that relate to exposure and traffic.
3. Define a content plan that is based on quality. Therefore, consider tweeting about items that you want to promote and include excellent content that relates to the items you want to promote but that is not promotional.
4. Curate the delightful content of others to add more value to your Twitter feed and to create and enhance relationships.

Here is a fun video from Adobe which shows a Marketing Manager who goes to a Fortune Teller to gain insights into what part of his marketing is working and which parts are not.

If you enjoyed and gained value from this post and enjoy using Twitter then you may be interested in the blog category Twitter Tips & Advice.