Recently, there has been a sea change in online marketing strategy, and it is all as a result of a little company called Twitter. You could be forgiven for scratching your head and asking “what’s the point?” or “what is it for?”. From the uninitiated, I hear this a lot. When it first launched, I asked myself those exact questions. Hopefully, in this short article, I can begin to shed some light on why it is going to impact the web in a very large way.
Since the beginning of January, Twitter has grown 800%, and currently makes up 0.12% of all Australian traffic on the Web. The overall traffic stats may not make your ears prick up, but that growth rate should. Twitter has been described as “The communication system we didn’t know we needed until we had it”, a “micro-blogging platform”, a “status updater”, a replacement for instant chat, simple RSS, and a “real-time search engine” among other things. The reality is that Twitter is all of these things; at least it enables all of these things. Really, it is another foundation technology like HTTP itself that the Web rests on.
The main reason for Twitter’s ability to provide a real-time corner stone is that its API allows the system to be repurposed for a multitude of different applications. Applications that the founders intentionally built a framework for, but couldn’t imagine at the time. Applications like cooperative corporate brand tweeting, tweet-trending, reputation tracking, emergency services communication, conference feedback, instant chat, real-time search, and the list goes on.
By enabling users to be able to create web pages from a single SMS, allowing for communication between unconnected users (like a phone) and removing the cost of short messages (like chat) then opening this up to developers, the rules of the web were rewritten, and real-time search was born.
As a retailer, the next obvious question is, “How does it help me?”
It allows you to take greater control of your brand, closer relationships with your customers, and can allow them to make closer relationships with each other.
As email strategies are slowly maturing, Twitter is another direct communication channel that many companies are using as part of their communication arsenal. But at the same time, it can be a very difficult weapon to wield in the online marketing world. The main reason for this is that Twitter’s immediacy, transparency and directness make the companies using it incredibly vulnerable to scrutiny. The channel by its very nature brings authenticity in a format that is near impossible to fake. For some companies, any opportunity to get closer to their customers and show their true colours is a great thing. For others, one-way communication tools provide a comfortable safety screen to hide behind.
I think the greatest benefits for people dipping their toes into the Twitter water is that you can learn a lot from just listening to your customers, and from enabling them to better connect with each other. After this, the best advice I can give is to engage with them like people, not pawns.
There are a multitude of tools that make it more efficient to track and talk (Twhirl, Tweetdeck, CoTweet etc) and others that allow you to quickly find those looking for your products and send them automated canned responses, or just do the search for those people so you can engage them like you would on the street (Tweethawk). Some are great time savers, but there are far too many to list here, and they are easy enough to find. The important take home message here is that Twitter is important, Twitter is powerful, direct and transparent. Like relationships in the real-world, the time you invest in them will be a fair barometer for what influence you should expect to get out. Maybe that’s why it is rumoured Google are looking to buy them.
PS. To find out how your Twitter driving is going, ask the Twitalyzer.
This article appeared in Inside Retailing Online
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