14
Sep

TWITTER MARKETING

Written on September 14, 2008 by Manuel Alonso Coto in E-MARKETING

I have been discussing the marketing possibilities of Twitter with my students of the Master in Digital Marketing this week.

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First time I heard of Twitter I thought what on earth could be more annoying and less useful than a site where thousands of people are given 140 characters to shout out about what they’re doing at every moment of the day? But I ‘m aware I’m a digital immigrant so I knew I had to give it a second thought… And once I did, I realized Twitter is a tool through which subscribers can further reach their audiences, real-time. For example, it’s useful for building consensus or a community of supporters,like we can check with my favourite candidate for the Whie House, Barack Obama, http://twitter.com/BarackObama
Some of the students recognize they are twitter addicts and suffer twitter abstinence syndroms.

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For them Twitter is the greatest communication tool in the last years. Of course Twitter is to inform friends or colleagues about their activities. But they also use Twitter to be informed about job offers, last articles written by their favorite publishers, to share links… They use the ‘track’ command to have the latest information regarding subjects of their interest. They use it as an alert system for concerts, with Twitterrific they can share as well their location. And all that without bothering emails or SMS, just access information when they have a while. And you are still wondering what is Twitter for? Twitter is so simple, so easy to use, that it fits several purposes in a perfect way…

It’s true that some people do use Twitter as if they’re trying to copy the most boring blog on the web. However, many others are sharing links to timely resources or things they’ve found on the web that they’d like to share/promote immediately as well as tidbits of personal/business information.
Other commercial and marketing use examples of Twitter include JetBlue http://twitter.com/JetBlue promoting special offers, the BBC http://twitter.com/bbcnews posting news items, or Apple http://twitter.com/bbcnews posts it’s own news .

We can think of several uses of Twitter as a marketing tool:
• Extending the reach for those individuals or companies that already have a blogging strategy in place
• Updating breaking news at conferences or events
• Updating your network to shape your own personal branding
• …

But we have to keep in mind Twitter is not for everyone… A perfect example of a digital natives’ channel, though we immigrants will slowly shuffle to it…

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What other marketing uses can you think of?

Best

Manuel A. Alonso Coto

Comments

Rahul September 15, 2008 - 11:44 am

I do not know how much one can use it for marketing effectively, but when it comes to personal branding i think this is a nice way to interact and is a great interaction platform.. do check out chris brogan on twitter http://www.chrisbrogan.com/free-ebook-on-personal-branding/

prestamos personales September 18, 2008 - 11:08 am

twitter is a great tool to let people know what you are doing or what are you going to do, is really userfull for politicans and Obama is the best doing this kind of marketing (web marketing)

Jose Llinares September 29, 2008 - 11:22 pm

Twitter is great marketing tool used as an alert or notification system, as you mentioned we can use Twitter for being updated for news, concerts, last offers, last posts published.

Brands can use Twitter to offer as well valuable information about them, or even used to communicate with customers directly (you can reply users directly).

No doubt then, about the great importance of this tools in the future.

Wael Kechli December 14, 2009 - 1:07 am

The twitter was out online in March 2006, and until last summer that it get famous. I recall reading 4 pages about twitter in well known magazines and so many articles about it in newspapers specially that politicians got involved. I can also consider the venture capital investment reached 35 million dollars in 2009 while it was 5 million in 2006. My personal opinion would be that it is still hard to market a product on twitter some special features should be added maybe this will help, but no one can deny that it can be perfectly use to market politicians, shows and to make the public share opinions during conferences and summits.
For example check the new twitters regarding the world climate summit 2009 in Copenhagen, I am sure that the politicians are more confident to take major decision in action after reading the public comments and getting their support.

Ram Parasuraman December 19, 2009 - 3:52 pm

I feel Twitter is an excellent Market Research tool. You can quickly brainstorm ideas and run them by a random group of people and get very quick feedback on it. Companies like Comcast and Whole Foods have used it to improve their brand image by providing customer service or infomercials via Twitter. For Small businesses, Twitter is an easy way to reach massive audiences. Take for instance PopChips or NakedPizza, these are stars in Twitterverse and could not have afforded Marketing budgets to get a similar reach using traditional or direct marketing efforts. Internet retailers make strategic announcements and hold competitions to increase buzz for their upcoming products via Twitter and so far it has worked extremely well!

I think Twitter is a very good Marketing tool, especially for small and local businesses!

Ezy-bid October 20, 2011 - 10:28 am

really helpful, this is very inspirational. Thank you for your superb post.
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Julia Serafina January 24, 2013 - 10:01 am

I just stumbled across your post. And great blog by the way. I have bookmarked it for further reading. I agree, Twitter is a fantastic communication tool. It can be used as a customer service channel, for recruiting, for market research and more. I wrote about this topic,Twitter Marketing recently which you might find interesting: However, for me it is it mostly an education tool where I keep up to date with industry trends. Simply love it.

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