Twitter Can Lower Marketing Costs
This column was written in December 2009 for Smart Business Network.
At a recent trade show in Washington, DC, a marketing executive for a mid-sized services firm said, “Marketing costs are a killer.” Instead of surprise, the remark triggered a rare executive bobble heads moment. Everyone nodded in agreement.
Big surprise: the economy continues to sputter. The good news is that the United States Post Office will bump its fees a couple of percentage points this year. The bad news is that the cost of paper, ink, and printing will keep going up.
A business, regardless of its size, has to communicate with its prospects and its clients. Traditional direct mail is now justifiable when there is a high probability payback. The days of millions of direct mail letters sent via snail mail are too expensive and slow for most business communications.
Email has become a problem. More efficient filtering systems at the Internet Service Provider level and in network devices like those from Astaro and Barracuda prevent some email from getting into an organization. The recipient may never see the message.
While not a cure all, Twitter is becoming as useful as a Swiss Army knife. Any executive can use a mobile device and Twitter to publicize any business event quickly, rapidly, and easily. Consider that Twitter costs nothing to use, and you have a digital gizmo that can do everything except make coffee. In this column, I want to provide a brief description and a suggestion about how to use a handful of little-known Twitter tools. If you want even more Twitter software widgets, navigate to found in SEOptimise’s “30+ Very Useful Twitter Tools You Must Be Aware Of.” (http://www.seoptimise.com/)
A question that arises frequently is, “Why should I use a toy service like Twitter?” One way to understand how Twitter is evolving is to use Twellow. (http://www.twellow.com/). The service presents Twitter “tweets” in the form of a business directory. With the proliferation of mobile devices, a service like Twellow provides a useful complement to the traditional Yellow Pages. Many organizations rely on Yellow Page listings, but grouse about the cost of the advertisement and the difficulty of calculating the return on what is becoming a very expensive investment. Twellow makes explicit that Twitter content can provide a potential customer with a way to locate your business. Unlike the Yellow Pages, Twitter and Twellow are free.
Twitter can be used for a direct mail blast. Unlike a promotional email, the Tweet is broadcast to everyone with a Twitter account. A key question is, “How can I target specific people via Twitter?” Crowdstatus.com (http://crowdstatus.com) makes it possible to create a specific group of recipients for a particular message. One way to use this service is to create a special landing page that contains the full marketing message. (A “landing page” is a page on a Web site that contains promotional material, a purchase or contact-me button, and other content such as a video that presents the complete marketing message to a prospect. Traffic to the landing page provides concrete click information so the effectiveness of a Twitter advertising blast can be measured.) The Tweet provides a brief description and a link to the digital ad. The benefit is that you sidestep email blockages and present a Tweet recipient with one-click access to your complete marketing message. Remember: a landing page can contain a sign up form, images, even videos.
If you have followed the recommendations offered in previous columns, your organization may have its own Web log. What happens when you or your colleagues post a new article? With Twitter Updater (http://www.firesidemedia.net/dev/software/wordpress/twitter-updater/), you can automatically send a Tweet each time your Web log is updated. Instead of waiting for one of the real time search engines like Technorati.com or Google Blogsearch to index your Web log, you can broadcast the availability of a new blog post at the same time the story goes live on your Web log.
The metaphor of the double tap ensures that you are firing your marketing rifle shot with maximum accuracy.
When you want to know what is hot or trending on Twitter, navigate to Tweetmeme.com. (http://www.tweetmeme.com). This service captures Tweets and analyzes their content. The service displays a league table showing the most popular topics at the moment you access the service. The service makes it possible to get valuable marketing insights, and you can get a sense of the types of topics that are striking a chord with the users of Twitter. Other trend spotting tools include TweetStats (http://tweetstats.com/) which provides you with a dashboard display of your Tweet activity and TwerpScan (http://twerpscan.com/) which makes it easy to see which of your followers is reading your messages.
Looking forward to 2010’s Twitter innovations, I suggest that your organization make use of Twitter. I find Twitter a useful adjunct to my business, but your mileage may vary. Even if you don’t integrate Twitter into your marketing plans in 2010, you will be able to benchmark the service’s utility. Looking ahead, Twitter will become a more important marketing tool. Twitter is moving toward an advertising and branding service for businesses. Unlike the familiar free service, Twitter wants to provide an organization with a way to get its message across for a fee. Details are murky but by this time in 2010, Twitter will have a full complement of for-fee services. Familiarity with Twitter today will make it easier to evaluate the company’s for-fee services as they become available.
The downside of Twitter is evident to even a novice user. The length of the Twitter “tweet” is 140 characters, and most organizations cannot name their company and state its principal line of business in 15 to 20 words. This means that the rhetoric of the marketing message sent via Twitter has to be carefully crafted. This is unfamiliar work, and some organizations may not want to devote time and energy to brevity. Second, Twitter is flaky. The rapid growth of the service puts a strain on the technical plumbing. Twitter is often down, sometimes for an hour or two and one every few months, a day or two. Finally, Twitter requires a different production method than writing a direct mail letter and buying a mailing list. An organization intent on making use of Twitter has to “tweet” often, build followers, and design “tweets” to link back to a landing page. In many ways, some organizations may find Twitter too much work for the uncertain benefits it offers.
With Twitter influencing Facebook’s communication methods, I think it is important for my business to use Twitter and learn what it can and cannot do. My experience with Twitter has been positive. With other companies getting more Twitter-like, the experience of learning and using Twitter for commercial intent is a valuable one. Twitter may not be the winner in the broadcast messaging market, but it is a center of gravity. Knowledge gained about Twitter today will pay dividends as more competitors offer similar features. A competitive advantage can be the difference between a profitable quarter and an unprofitable one in today’s economic environment. Tweet that.
Stephen E. Arnold, December 7, 2009