"How will it make me money?" is, overwhelmingly, the single most asked question I get when I suggest a brand open a Twitter account.
There are 3 ways brands can increase revenue on Twitter:
Create Awareness
First, you need to know who your target audience is: what they're interested in, what they want to know, and how to talk to them.
Once you know that, you can engage them by:
Creating original content: This simply means proving value to your target audience. If you find out that some of your customers like flowers, and some like cars; it would make sense to either create content about those things, or at least find interesting content to refer your audience to. Ideally, you'll throttle how often you tweet about flowers as opposed to cars so that both the car-lovers and flower-lovers get value from following you.
Offering incentives: A great way to create awareness is to offer incentives via Twitter; especially if the incentive is exclusively offered through Twitter.
Designing promotions: Like offering incentives; designing Twitter-based promotions is a great way to get your name out there. (i.e. #moonfruit)
Reinforce Branding
Whether it's your corporate or personal brand; the best branding has guidelines. Once you have these guidelines defined (visual appearance, tone, interest, etc.) you can begin reinforcing it.
3 interesting ways I've observed brands doing this through Twitter are:
Reinforcing Tone: The language Dell uses to communicate with its customers is very different from the language Mountain Dew uses. Twitter is a GREAT way to engage your audience in extended conversations and truly reinforce your brands voice.
Bringing Life to the Brand: I don't have a good example of a consumer brand doing this, but I've seen many companies/ personal brands bring life to their brand by personalizing their Tweets. Including information about where they eat, what they do in their free-time etc. is a great way to make your brand feel more alive.
Empowering Customers: Brands are starting to be more collaborative with regards to their identity; actually engaging users to help define what the brand could look like. (I personally don't believe the majority of customers have the ability to accurately articulate what they'd really like a brand to be; but many people do have the ability to interpret what customers REALLY mean.)
Directly Drive Sales
Many companies want to skip directly to sales; thinking increased revenue = increased sales. Which is absolutely correct. Creating awareness & reinforcing branding only increase revenue because they passively increase sales.
Here's the meat; 3 goals to directly drive sales:
Generate Leads: Twitter is great for generating leads. Your follower-base represents a good set of leads to mine; but you can get even more information by engaging users outside of Twitter via the 'sign-in with Twitter' API. Because Twitter is a very accessible system; it's easy to target specific groups of followers & non-followers. The benefit of targeting followers is that you can engage them via Direct Messages (which I have seen done well).
Generate Traffic: The social network component of Twitter makes it great for spreading a message throughout the network. If you have something entertaining, valuable, or engaging you can generate large amounts of traffic; and direct them to do what you want.
Drive Trial/ Purchases: One of the great things about Twitter is the diverse and unique groups of people who actively participate in the community. Depending on what type of product/ service you have to offer; you can blanket the twitter-sphere with your offer; or scale it down to a one-on-one personal conversation. (or a combination)
"Thank you for the strategic check-list; I've made my choices - now how do I execute this?" would be the question I hear about 2 weeks after I've convinced them to start a Twitter account.
It's not simple to provide a generic response; but here's my attempt. (Feel free to comment with an example, and I'll give you a better explanation.)
You've set up your Twitter account, are ready to start engaging & need to develop a reputation. What kind of Twitterer are you? (More importantly, what kind of Twitterer is your brand?) Regardless of what you choose; you need to do 2 things:
SUPPORT YOUR CUSTOMERS: If a customer asks a question, posts a concern, or makes you aware of a complaint; your brand needs to respond. (Even if the appropriate response is not to respond; you need to evaluate the comment and make that decision.)
PARTICIPATE WITH THE COMMUNITY: This would seem like a no-brainer, but many brands don't understand that participation doesn't mean having an intern spend 50% of his time in front of CoTweet from 9am-5pm. Participation means entrenching yourself, and committing to following people your brand is interested in, Tweeting about relevant topics, engaging in relevant conversations, and supporting the community.
Do these 2 things, and you'll develop the reputation you want; if you decide not to do these things - you'll leave your brand open to the opinion of the community.
Let's assume you've developed a good reputation, and you have a follower base. You want to monopolize on your hard work and integrate your network with your other marketing initiatives. (Note: you can begin doing these things concurrently as your developing your reputation.)
EASY: SHARING
The easy way to integrate Twitter with your current marketing initiatives is to add sharing functionality to everything you produce. This doesn't just mean adding a "follow us on Twitter" badge to your monthly email. It means structuring your email articles, your site, your promotions, etc... in such a way that users can share a direct link very easily. (Ideally, with 1 click)
AVERAGE: CONTENT GENERATION
Generating content is a little bit more difficult to integrate than sharing, but it generally has a higher payoff. Twitter users are a unique breed when it comes to syndication & publishing; they generally have a high appreciation of both. (I chalk it up to the ReTweet being seen as a thumbs-up to someone who posted something interesting.)
There are many ways to integrate content from twitter, from product reviews, to ratings, to comments, to chats, to multi-media submissions by combining Twitter with YouTube or Flickr and interpreting links to retrieve content. The idea is to encourage Twitter users to submit content that will appear in your e-mail, site, or promotion.
HARD: PARTICIPATION
A harder tactic is to integrate real-time participation with your campaigns. This essentially means, actions that are taken on Twitter are interpreted my the campaign in real-time.
e.g.
- Imagine being able to control Burger Kings "Subservient Chicken" by typing a command in Twitter with the appropriate hash tag.
- Imagine being entered into a contest by Tweeting a specific phrase.
- Imagine a scavenger hunt that rewards you for finding & following specific profiles