As micro-blogging platform Twitter enters the mainstream and its founders contemplate charging for commercial accounts, marketers should begin to explore its application as a direct response channel.
This blog has been critical in the past of companies and celebrities tripping over themselves - and their virtual tongues - to climb aboard the Twitter bandwagon. Appropriate use of the platform is going to be relevant for some time yet. However, as it moves from the early adopter to early majority group of the technology adoption lifecycle, the Twitter community will become more open and receptive to marketing activities that deliver value to them.
The biggest opportunity might lie with direct response. Much has been made in the past of the benefits of using SMS as a channel for soliciting responses from customers. However, unless SMS is also used to elicit the response, it requires the customer to consciously change their device in order to respond. Call me old-fashioned, but I also believe that consumers are more cautious about sending texts that reveal their phone numbers to anonymous recipients, in part because of a plethora of scare stories and the use of the channel by unscrupulous companies.
Instead, marketers can now experiment with Twitter for direct response. Rather than use a mobile shortcode and keyword, they can invite customers to "D @company keyword" via Twitter, without any of the inbound or outbound SMS costs associated with mobile marketing. Yet like text messaging, the company can begin to build a relationship with the customer via Twitter - and even follow their updates to understand what motivates and interests them.
Now that Twitter is mainstream, how long before we see the first mainstream use of Twitter as a direct response channel?
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