SEO Marketing

Pick your favorite restaurant. Any cuisine, any location. Now search for it on Twitter. Chances are, if it is a larger company or chain, you will find it. If your search doesn’t result in an official page, send out a tweet asking if anyone else has heard of the place. “A recent study from LinkedIn and Harris Interactive showed that only 8% of advertisers and consumers think Twitter is a "very effective" promotion tool.” That is quite interesting. However, it is much easier in some respects to measure the effectiveness of a Twitter campaign than traditional forms of advertising.

For example, Taco Bell has a Twitter page. They use it to inform their customers about new coupons, contests, and interact with fans. How effective is their Twitter page? Here are some basic ways any business can track their Twitter statistics and compare them to traditional media metrics. “For raw broadcast reach, your number of Followers is the leading indicator because it quantifies your baseline Twitter audience.” Taco Bell has 16,040 followers. Not bad when you compare it to McDonalds’ 16,727 followers. Pizza Hut, which often partners with Taco Bell locations, has 26,454 followers.

Google Analytics is one of my favorite tools to use to see how much of your website’s traffic is coming from Twitter or any site for that matter. “What are they looking at? What is working? What is not?” Third party tools come in hand and are a valuable way to easily see how effective your Twitter page is. For example, check out Tweet Stats, it puts all your tweets into an easy to read graph that shows you how much you tweet and how often other reply to your tweets. “@Replies, Twitter’s public conversation feature, is the most significant engagement quantifier because your audience is responding to your message.” Taco Bell has an average reply rate of 30.37%. See how simple it is to find the effectiveness of your Twitter promotions?

Social media marketing has become the hottest new way to attract, inform, and influence customers. There are several uses that Twitter is especially effective at such as: updating customers of deals or coupons, offering real-time customer support, or gaining customer loyalty by responding to comments and complaints. Many larger companies are already using Twitter for these purposes.

For example, DellOutlet posts bargains on refurbished Dell computers, DellSMBnews offers advice and information for small and medium businesses, while DellLounge is more of a fan community “bringing you cutting edge trends in Music, Film, Art and Technology.” Walmart.com and HobbyLobbyStore posts current deals and coupon offerings. Comcast, JetBlue, and TheHomeDepot offer customer support with JetBlue even posting the names of those “currently on duty”.

Many major companies use Twitter as a mean to connect with their customers. McDonalds for example states “we’re here to listen and learn from all of our fans and followers” in their biography of themselves. Other examples include SouthwestAir which has “non-official, entertaining discussions with their customers”, HRBlock which answers questions, SnickersIceCrm engages with fans, BBy_community is Best Buy’s online support page, WholeRecipes offers recipes from Whole Foods Market, and WholeFoods offers “fresh organic tweets” from their headquarters in Texas. TacoBell_jobs even offers what available positions there are in all their locations.

Twitter is a wonderful way to communicate with customers on a more personal level without expending a lot of effort. It is simple to set up and maintain a Twitter page, making it a cost-effective method of public relations. Further, the marketing applications you can use it for: pointing people to your blog, website, current deals, or even video commercials makes a Twitter page an important part of any social marketing campaign.

Contests and giveaways are popular ways to increase brand recognition and now with the advent of social media, it can also serve as a way to build a fan base on Facebook. For example, Herbal Essences received thousands of new fans this past summer when it gave away a free bottle of shampoo to the first several thousand respondents,which was very successful for them. Babies’ r Us offered $5 gift cards for everyone who became a fan on January 28th. Incentives such as these give visitors a tangible reason to join and a positive impression of your brand. Consider what you can do for your business using these social media techniques.
Burger King had a creative spin off of this technique. You can receive a coupon for a free burger at their store, but first you must unfriend ten of your friends. “Each time a friend is excommunicated, the application sends a notification to the banished party via Facebook's news feed explaining that the user's love for the unlucky soul is less than his or her zeal for the Whopper.”
“One of my favorite stories about social media involves the Coca Cola Facebook page. The fan page was created by two users who liked Coke. What started as a fan page for fun, turned out to be the largest product fan page on Facebook. Coca Cola, instead of taking over the page and making it their own, Coke rewarded their fans by bringing them to Atlanta and giving them a tour of the Coke facility. The fan page remains theirs, but now they have the blessing and help of Coca Cola.” Why create a fan page from scratch if someone else has done much of the hard work for you? Are there fans of your business or product that already have a fan page for it? Perhaps you could encourage your fans in a similar fashion as Coke did.

The Facebook demographic began as mostly teenagers. The statistics through 2009 show 40% of users were age thirteen to eighteen. Women outnumber men by a slim margin, but the age demographic has changed. The category of age thirty-five to fifty-four has grown significantly and as of 2010 there are over eighteen million users over the age of forty-five. This change in demographic will affect every company fan page as well as the advertising offered. Brands such as Victoria Secret’s Pink fan page that catered to the teenager/college-aged crowd have garnered extremely large, dedicated followings.
According to social marketing experts, “Some brands cannot expect huge followings on Facebook. Brands or product lines targeting the demographic most prominent on Facebook tend to see the quickest growth.” Many political analysts believe that a large part of the reason President Obama won the last campaign was because he marketed himself to the younger generations using Facebook, Twitter, and other social media networks. Encouraging the young voters to become involved in politics and share their concerns with him led him to be viewed as a modern candidate who was in touch with their needs.
Although contests, giveaways, and other advertising methods can be useful for increasing the size of your Facebook fan page, this type of approach has a quick growth then stagnation period usually. It is much better to provide quality content and grow “organically” for an engaged and active fan base. Word-of-mouth will serve you much better in the long run than a month-long ad campaign. Creating a Facebook fan page isn’t difficult to do, but it can have a huge impact on the success of your company.