What is twitter?
Twitter is one of the most popular social networking platforms out there, with 645,750,000 registered users and an average of 58 million tweets a day, as of March 25th 2015 (Huffington Post (2015)). Consequently, one can comprehend why twitter is one of the most popular social network platforms there is.
In consideration of the statistics previously outlined, it is evidential why companies invest such a large amount of resources to the marketing campaign on twitter.
Twitter for marketing purposes
This section will be a brief discussion regarding twitter as a marketing channel.
Twitter is obvious an excellent way to communicate with potential customers, Duncan and Moriarty (Duncan and Moriarty (1998, p.8)) outlined that interactivity between the company and the customer is a “hallmark of the paradigm shift in both marketing and communication”. Twitter as a marketing strategy has enormous potential, such as reaching millions of people, the communication with individuals on a personal level, and the ability to interact with customers easily. It is clear that one of the most important benefits of twitter is the interactivity which companies can achieve with ease.
Twitter solves a key problem companies have, the ability to give customers feedback. Before the use of twitter, companies responded to customers via email, phone, mail and other slow means of communication. Twitter has provided an alternative from using these means of communication, by replying to customers with a short response, instead of a lengthy and slow response. The BBC (18 September 2013) performed an experiment testing the response time on twitter, and the quickest response was in just 3 minutes. This is just one way of outlining the excellent use of twitter in interacting with customers.
Companies will use twitter in different ways in consideration of their sector, industry, geographical markets and other factors (Burton & Sobelava (2011)). In the next section we will see this in practice by outlining some of the best companies which have used twitter as an excellent interactive tool.
The success stories
Victoria’s Secret
Victoria’s Secret utilises twitter to interact with its customers with the hashtag #AskAnAngel. This hashtag campaign has given hundreds of thousands of people to interact with the face of the brand.
Warby Parker
Warby Parker interacts with its customers through twitter competitions. Using a hashtag #whereswarby
Wendys
Wendy’s a restaurant chain in the US has created a page for a type of burger they sell in their restaurants. This specific page has competitions where the individual has to tweet the page.
Nike
Nike interacts with individuals by posting motivating tweets.
KJ Wines
KJ Wines is a winery which interacts with its customers frequently, mainly regarding questions about wine.
Disney
Disney interacts with its customers by playing games such as requesting the individuals to fill in the blanks in their most well-known songs.
Conclusion
In this blog we have outlined how a twitter can be used as an outstanding interactive tool. Twitter’s potential as a marketing strategy is far reaching, this blog has outlined a number of ways a company can interact with the individual twitter user. Thus, can be used by businesses as an interactive tool to humanise the business (Singh, 2008)
References
Burton, Suzan, and Alena Soboleva. “Interactive or reactive? Marketing with Twitter.” Journal of Consumer Marketing 28.7 (2011): 491-499.
Duncan, Tom, and Sandra E. Moriarty. “A communication-based marketing model for managing relationships.” The Journal of marketing (1998): 1-13.
Sing, T, Veron-Jackson, L and Cullinane, J. (2008) Blogging: A new play in your marketing game plan. Business Horizons. Vol. 51, Issue 4. Pages 281-292