Twitter marketing guide

Twitter marketing
Smarter Guide
Author: Rhian Simms and Susanne Colwyn
Edited by: Dr Dave Chaffey
Updated: November 2013

Section1
Introduction
Section6
ENGAGE
Section7
Resources
Section5
CONVERT
Section4
ACT
Section3
REACH
Section2
PLAN
© Smart Insights (Marketing Intelligence) Limited. Please go to www.smartinsights.com to feedback or access our other guides.
Twitter marketing
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Twitter marketing
Smarter Guide
Contents
3  ONE.
An introduction to marketing with Twitter
13  TWO.
PLAN: Developing a Twitter strategy
22  THREE.
REACH: Reaching your audience through Twitter
38  FOUR.
ACT: Encouraging interaction with Twitter
44  FIVE.
CONVERT: Turning Twitter interactions into leads and sales
47  SIX.
ENGAGE: Keeping your audience engaged
52  SEVEN.
Resources

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ENGAGE
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CONVERT
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ONE
An introduction to marketing with Twitter
rr Q. Has a Twitter profile been set up in line with good practice?
What is Twitter?
Twitter is a social media network that provides a real-time
platform for companies and individuals to interact and
engage with people with shared interests through
user-generated content.
As a mature social network with over 280 million active
users sharing over a 400 million tweets every day1
, Twitter
has become a key marketing platform to support a range
of marketing communications approaches including: public
relations (PR), customer service, brand awareness, events,
engagement, lead generation and conversion, to name
just a few. Its value is suggested by the $14 billion IPO in
November 2013 which is likely to lead to more advertising
options.
This original ‘back-of-the-envelope’ mock-up of Twitter
shows that it was planned for personal updates, but it is now widely used for business
updates too.
Succinct status updates are the key to Twitter’s success with users tweeting up to 140
characters, including shortened links to videos, pictures, photos and other sites or blogs, where
other users will share content by ‘retweeting’ if it’s interesting, informative or humorous.
What is it? Twitter
Twitter is a micro-blogging social media site providing a platform for users to broadcast up
to 140-character ‘tweets’ to engage in conversation, with photos, images, videos and links.
Here’s a practical tip to start us off. Did you know that you can incorporate interesting tweets
into your campaign pages by using the Twitter sharing widget as in this example? These are
called ‘embedded tweets’2
.
1 Twitter Press Release: Usage numbers
2 Twitter support: Embedded tweets.

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Best Practice Tip 1 Use embedded tweets to share tweets within your content
You can include specific tweets live in your page or blog post if you go to the individual
status update in Twitter you want to include. Then click on the date to the right of the post
in Twitter and choose the ‘Embed this tweet’ option. What’s more, Twitter just released the
ability to add photo to embedded Tweets.
This guide is aimed at helping you, either if you’re new to Twitter or already tweeting. It will
show you tips and strategies to leverage all features of Twitter to give you or your clients
tangible business results.
Quick Jargon Guide
Here’s a guide for new users to the main jargon involved with using Twitter’s features:
þþ @ Sign. Used to promote another Twitter usernames account in your tweet or to send a
message. When a username is preceded by a @, it links to their Twitter account.
þþ #. Hashtag. Identifies a topic, event or keyword in a tweet.
þþ Direct messages, ‘DMs’. A personal tweet not viewable by others is sent to another user
by the prefix ‘DM’, e.g. DM @username do you want to meet this evening?
þþ Tweets (verb, to ‘tweet’). An individual posts a message of up to 140 characters. It can
include an image, link or photo.
þþ Modified tweet, ‘MTs’. Similar to a retweet; a modified tweet paraphrased from someone
else’s tweet.
þþ Retweets, ‘RTs’. To share a tweet from another user prefixed by another user, for
example, RT @SmartInsights Digital marketing feedback tools: http://bit.ly/smartfeedback
þþ Timeline. Real-time list of tweets on Twitter by time and date, in the order they were
posted, which appear on the Twitter account user’s homepage.

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þþ Listed. Included in another Twitter users’s list.
þþ Avatar. The profile picture on your Twitter account.
þþ Favourites. A Twitter user can mark a tweet as their favourite, by selecting the yellow star
next to the tweet.
There is a more extended list of Twitter terms from their glossary at the end of this guide.
Who is using Twitter?
Twitter is used by celebrities, individuals who follow and engage with brands, and business
users. The adoption by celebrities and brands is changing the relationships between
consumers and brands, and also celebrities and the media.
The Big Green Bookshop in London successfully used Twitter to save their business. In
2011, they tweeted their business was going to close so Twitter fans raised its profile through
retweets in order to successfully boost sales.
Globally, large brands and those in the Fortune Global 100 companies are also reaping
success whether it’s responding to customer service questions, retail stores driving foot fall
into stores or web promotions, to name just a few. We’ll share more Twitter success stories
throughout this guide.
Celebrities are growing their fan base via Twitter and in the UK, pop group One Direction and
actress Emma Watson rank as the top 2 UK twitter accounts with most followers in the UK.
Between them, they have over 25 million followers.
Social Bakers ‘brand movers’ compilation gives an interesting compilation of brands that are
successful in engaging users on Twitter.
Best Practice Tip 2 Tap into the zeitgeist (what’s hot) in your country
Use the free Social Bakers compilation to tap into the zeitgeist in your country.

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Statistics on Twitter usage
Twitter has been in existence since 2006 and has a growing customer base fuelled by the
use of the social network by brands, celebrities and publishers. In September 2013, Twitter
announced that it has 15 million active users in the UK and 200 million active worldwide, with
over 500 million registered accounts. There has been a rapid growth in usage and over 80
per cent of British users access Twitter from a mobile device.
According to a 2013 study by WebGlobalIndex, Twitter is now the fastest growing social
platform in the world with Facebook a close second.
From the same survey, it is believed that Twitter has:
þþ Over 500 million accounts registered on twitter.com.
þþ 288 million monthly active users around the world.
þþ Over 60 per cent of these people are now mobile users – 80 per cent in the UK.
þþ 36 per cent of the global internet population has a Twitter account.
þþ An average of 400 million tweets sent a day.
þþ Almost half of all users do not tweet, but instead use it as a directory to find information.
With Twitter marketing, it’s important to realise that many users are mobile, showing their
context of use. This also means that many users are using apps rather than the desktop
Twitter site meaning that referrals from links in Tweets are more likely to be referenced as
direct traffic rather than from the Twitter site. This can underestimate the value of visits from
Twitter since they will show in analytics as direct visits, showing the need to add additional
tracking in Twitter links as suggested in this post by Time Leighton Boyce.
The business case for using Twitter
Twitter can be integrated successfully into a company’s marketing strategy with a clear
Twitter strategy and objectives as covered in more detail in the section on planning.
Prior to using any social media tool or starting a marketing campaign, there are some initial
stages you should perform first as explained in the Smart Insights 7 Steps Guide to Social
Media Marketing. The initial evaluation should involve:
þþ Understanding and listening to your existing or potential customers and key ‘influencers’,
or assessing if customers are not talking about you, and determining how to reach them.
þþ Assessing your competitors.
þþ Experimenting with the features.
þþ Setting your objectives and goals.
þþ Deciding how Twitter can add value and meet your objectives when incorporated into
campaigns.
Katy Howell, Managing Director, Immediate Future sums up the way to thinking about the
business case by saying: ‘In truth, like any social media platform, there is no compulsion
for brands to have a Twitter profile. There are only two reasons for being on Twitter: your
audience is there, engaged and active; and you have something to say’.
Strategy Recommendation 1 Assess your business case for using Twitter before starting

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Being active on Twitter can expand your visibility and promote your products or services
online regardless of the size or sector of a company. It can meet a range of objectives
and while it needs resourcing at the right level, no media budget is required. Define
your objectives and assess how it can add value to you and your customers. It works
better in some sectors, but many business-to-business and consumer companies use it
successfully.
Companies are using Twitter to support a range of business objectives, including: customer
service; branding; product development; assessing user experience; obtaining customer
feedback; keeping customers informed about latest news; driving traffic online; and much
more.
The benefits include: improved brand awareness; increased traffic to their website; increased
sales and leads; improved search engine optimisation (SEO); additional PR coverage;
improved customer insight; and improved customer satisfaction.
To add some detail to this, to make a business case for more activity on Twitter, you can also
consider how Twitter activity can help assist:
þþ SEO: Twitter creates direct traffic to sites from links, and also sharing content across
a wide audience through retweets. This improves search results indirectly since when
Twitter links are retweeted some websites which embed their tweets may pull through
your tweets and mentions, extending your content to other websites or blogs and
improving your search rankings.
þþ Social media marketing of your business: Brand metrics can help you understand your
brand equity, recall, recognition, propensity to buy or recommend, and favourability.
þþ Impact on PR: Assess the impact of Twitter on your PR strategy through your mentions
and tweets appearing in other blogs, websites or influencers writing about and sharing
your content.
þþ Customer retention: Engaged customers are more likely to remain loyal to a company.
Twitter is a cost-effective way to retain your customers as they are excellent ‘Referrers’.
Customer retention rates and the percentage of orders from existing customers will help
you evaluate Twitter engagement.
þþ Sales and profit: This measurement may be long term as the company may focus on
less tangible objectives such as customer service, resolving issues and more to reduce
their churn rate. Longer term it will result in positive recommendations, high satisfaction
and increased customer acquisition.
þþ Influence: To assess if your brand, company or person is changing behaviour or
perception, you may wish to consider this new measure. Third-party tools can help to
define a score based on different metrics. Read more in the next Section on Tools to
measure Twitter on how to set this up.
þþ Customer service: Many customers now require service via Twitter, so it can be
damaging if Twitter customer service isn’t available.
An outline of how to get started on Twitter
It is quick to set up a Twitter account. If you aren’t yet an active ‘tweeter’, then here are some
practical steps to get you started, if you are going to manage a company profile or setup your
own profile.
Before you start, it’s important to have your Twitter Strategy defined, as detailed in Section 2,
‘Plan’, to set you on the right track.

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How to get started on Twitter...
For each of the steps listed here, refer to the Virgin Atlantic on Twitter for a real-world
example of a well-designed brand profile.
þþ 1. Register with Twitter. Visit https://twitter.com/signup to sign up and create an account.
þþ 2. Choose a Twitter name. Either choose your personal name or your company’s name
for business purposes. Even if you are not looking to use your account immediately,
create your account as soon as possible so no one hijacks your brand. Well-known
brands can apply for a verified account3
(look for the blue ‘tick’ icon next to the Twitter
User name in the header.
Best Practice Tip 3 Company account – secure your brand name
You secure your brand by registering a domain name for a website, so protect your
business Twitter account too. If your name is gone, you can add ‘official’, e.g. @
OfficialAdele, @SpursOfficial.
þþ 3. Customise your profile. Update your online bio, personal details, link to your site or
blog, and if using Twitter for customer service, add any user information about response
times or who will be responding where relevant.
Best Practice Tip 4 An interesting bio will create good first impressions and create followers
Other followers will read your bio to identify if you are an expert in your field and whether
you are tweeting interesting and informative content, which they can share. You are limited
to character spaces, so avoid glib words such as technologist, passionate, strategist,
unique, authority, workaholic, guru and serial entrepreneur.
þþ 4. Define the privacy settings of your account. Set up your account as public (visible
to everyone) or private account (visible to your followers). It’s recommended to set up a
public account for SEO and Google indexing.
3 Twitter support: creating a verified account.

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þþ 5. Add a profile picture. If you have a personal account, use a high resolution image of a
personal photo which will help you with networking and meetings. However, for business
accounts, it is professional to use the same image across all other social digital channels
for brand consistency. Perhaps use your logo, or an image that represents your company.
Best Practice Tip 5 Avatars can be small images in Twitter accounts so use with caution
If you have a business and personal account, be careful with using Avatars for both
accounts – it’s hard to distinguish between your accounts.
þþ 6. Customise the background. You should customise the background of your account
to include branding or information on your brand to the left of your tweets as shown in the
Virgin Atlantic example. Use this with caution since depending on screen resolution, some
followers only see tweets and not your background.
Best Practice Tip 6 Make sure your profile images work at a range of resolutions
Use an appealing profile image that your background works well with for all screen
resolutions. Some companies include different contact points in the left area such as phone
numbers.
This is how Tony Hsieh of Zappos uses the left area on Twitter to give contact information:
þþ 7. Customise your header. In September 2012 Twitter added an option to improve the
header of each profile, and it is anticipated that another one is afoot. You can learn how to
update your profile change in this Twitter support article4
but also using this Social Media
Cheat Sheet from Media Bistro.
4 Twitter support article: Customising your image.

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þþ 8. Customise your email settings. Decide if you wish to receive email notifications
for actions with your account, i.e. if someone adds you to the favourites list, retweets or
follows you. Customise this in ‘Settings and Notifications’ to change your settings.
þþ 9. Set up your Twitter lists. Once you are following more than a handful of people it will
be difficult to follow your stream. Lists are invaluable here to group and segment your
audience. They are key to using tools such as HootSuite where streams for different lists
can be set up in different columns as shown below:
Best Practice Tip 7 Use Twitter lists to review communications from different types of
audience and content providers
Examples of lists you should create and then follow, starting with your own company include:
þþ Employees (you can share this one within Twitter).
þþ Sites (if you have several Twitter sites from your company you want to follow.
þþ Competitors broken down by sector.
þþ Key influencers (tools to identify these are described in Step 3).
þþ Media sites/trade publications.
Here are some examples of well-designed Twitter profiles:
þþ Innocent Drinks
þþ Mini
þþ Domino Pizza
þþ Asda
þþ Adidas
þþ Bang & Olufsen
You can set up your main Twitter lists in one tab of the social media management tool
HootSuite5
as shown in this example:
5 HootSuite is the management tool we recommend for posting updates to Twitter, reviewing
interactions and tracking. It can be used across a range of channels.

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Larger brands may decide to use multiple twitter accounts for different purposes. Here’s how
Dell do this on their social media hub page :
Best Practice Tip 8 Larger brands should consider a range of accounts for different
purposes
Large companies may need different Twitter channels, for example:
þþ Corporate Twitter.
þþ Country sites.
þþ Customer service sites.
þþ Journalists’ sites (Twitter does this).

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TWO
PLAN: Developing a Twitter strategy
rr Q. Has a Twitter plan been created?
To use Twitter to best effect for your business, it’s important to have a strategy that fits your
audience needs and business priorities. Depending on your current usage of social media
and the marketing mix, you will need to consider how to best integrate Twitter with your
communications strategy, both online and offline. Like any plan, it will evolve as you monitor
and measure against your objectives and aims.
Katy Howell of Immediate Future reinforces the importance of planning: ‘One word: plan. It
might be easy to set up a Twitter profile, but the hard work (and the results) is in the planning.
And don’t just plan for the next few months – think long term.’
Strategy Recommendation 2 Ensure your Twitter strategy is aligned to your followers’ needs
Understand how Twitter can help your audience since the profile and wants of your Twitter
audience may be quite different from other channels. Review typical profiles, then define
your goals, assess your competitors, understand your target audience, define your content
communications strategy and determine your knowledge performance indicators (KPIs) for
success.
Create an outline of your Twitter plan
rr Q. Have we outlined a brief plan of how we will use Twitter?
You won’t want or need to write at length on how Twitter will be used, it’s only one channel.
But to make the most of it, you should be clear on how you want to use it for communications
otherwise you will miss opportunities, waste resources and, worst still, could damage the
company reputation.
Has a Twitter plan been written? Follow the same method of writing a marketing campaign
plan.
rr Q. Has the business case been assessed and objectives defined? This guide will help
you understand how Twitter can support your business goals and provide examples of
case studies of those who have had successes.
rr Q. Has the market usage of Twitter been assessed (customers, competitors, influencers)?
rr Q. Have you defined your business case and evaluated how Twitter can support your
objectives?
rr Q. Have you set your communication strategy (type and frequency of status updates and
interactions and how they align with marketing campaigns)?
rr Q. Is there a governance policy in place to reduce the risk of damaging your brand?
rr Q. Have you assessed and agreed your resources to manage your account?
As a starting point for creating your plan, ‘listen first’.

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Strategy Recommendation 3 Start by listening to Twitter conversations for your market
Don’t jump straight in, understand what is shared to start with.
Start monitoring Twitter interactions
You can set up standard searches in Twitter and in management tools like HootSuite so you
can review the latest activity related to your company and market.
Listen to what your customers are discussing about your brand, your product or your services
and how your competitors are using Twitter. Use tools like Twitter Search or Twitter Advanced
Search to explore the keywords, #hashtags and brand terms which are prominent in your
market.
You can also use these social media monitoring tools6
. Of these, Social Mention is the best
of the free tools for all networks with Topsy, which we reference later, the best specifically for
Twitter.
Best Practice Tip 9 Monitoring keywords and using advanced search operators can identify
opportunities and threats
Listening and monitoring Twitter will help you evaluate your brand awareness, competitor
analysis, challenges and, more importantly, the size of your potential audience.
6 Smart Insights: Reputation management tools.

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Keywords you should monitor
The most important keywords you should monitor in Twitter or your social media
management platform are:
þþ Your @brand name or @Twitter name for when someone mentions or retweets your
company name.
þþ Your brand name and company sub-brands.
þþ Hashtags related to your campaigns.
þþ Your competitor @name and brand name and company sub-brands.
þþ Hashtags relevant to your market. Remember that a Twitter search shows the most
popular tweets which can be useful for curating content.
þþ Other keywords referencing the interests of your audience, particularly those which show
an interest, for example: questions, problems or positive comments. Some listening
tools such as Viral Heat (www.viralheat.com) will identify these terms as leads for you to
follow-up on.
Best Practice Tip 10 Use advanced search syntax to better understand how your audience
uses Twitter and to overcome the limitations of Twitter’s basic search
Use search operators such as those outlined in the table below, in particular: @username,
‘phrase in quotes’, question, local search phrase near:location. Particularly interesting are
the sentiment measures and questions about a topic which are available at the bottom of
the Advanced search box also.
Alternatively, you can use the Advanced Search: https://twitter.com/search-advanced to apply
some of the relevant shortcuts.

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Review target audience types for your communications plan
rr Q. Have you defined your target audience for your communications plan?
Before you start any marketing plan, identify who you are communicating with on Twitter and
build a profile about them. Your Twitter audiences will likely include these types:
þþ Existing customers.
þþ Prospects.
þþ Influencers such as bloggers and the media.
þþ Trolls or troublemakers.
Twitter provides tools to help you segment your audience within lists, which in turn helps with
your followers’ strategy, outlined in Section 3 ‘Reach’.
Strategy Recommendation 4 Create profile personas of your key audience types
Take a sample of your Twitter followers (or competitors if you’re not fully launched
on Twitter) and identify key audience types. Use these personas to inform your
communications strategy for Twitter.
We recommend you audit followers based on their profile information and activity to get an
idea of three to six typical customer/prospect personas. You should consider these details for
profile:
þþ Age and gender.
þþ Location.
þþ Type of sites/social pages they link to (if any).
þþ Types of company (for business-to-business).
þþ Activity on Twitter – type of information shared, sites and content they link to (including
yours).
A good free tool to help you understand your audience’s locations, interests and
demographics is available from the ‘Audience Analysis’ function at Twtrland.com, or from
Followerwonk.
Once you have audited use of Twitter in your marketplace, you can then outline the
communications approach to interact with different audiences.

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What should be included in a Twitter communications plan?
As we noted previously, since Twitter is only a single channel, this plan doesn’t have to be too
involved. It should be based around key communications issues and resourcing to keep your
content fresh and relevant. It should reference content creation strategies, resourcing and
communications to build brand awareness, favourability and purchase intent using Twitter.
Twitter objectives
rr Q. Have goals been defined for Twitter?
Along with other social media platforms, Twitter gives an opportunity to link your digital and
offline marketing strategy with social media and so the image you present must represent
your company well.
You should think about and ask yourself the following questions:
rr Q. Which business goals can we support by using Twitter?
This may be increased brand awareness, increased interaction with customers, to reach
out to new customers, to build a brand identity, to humanise your brand, to show what you
represent and your core values.
rr Q. Who will be responsible for managing Twitter and how much time can be dedicated to
it?
Twitter isn’t as sophisticated as other tools like Facebook and Google+ for sharing
administrators, so you will need to share logins, or post using a tool like HootSuite.
Depending on the size of the company, different people may be administrators for different
brands, countries or for promotion against customer service.
rr Q. How will we measure success?
You need to know whether your Twitter plan is working so decide which methods described later
in this step will be used to track your success. Measure the impact of your Twitter campaigns
or plans against key metrics so you can improve your strategy and attain management buy-in
for future investment, whether this is financial or more resources. Measurement is not always
financial and can include softer metrics, which the next Section will cover.
Using Twitter to support lifecycle communications
In this section we will cover how to use Twitter to support communications throughout the
customer lifecycle. In each section of the report you should sketch out your initial thoughts
here, by answering these questions:
1. Method for generating awareness (covered in ‘Reach’ Section)
How will you encourage people to visit or sign up to your Twitter profile(s), for example
through integrating it into your site, outreach to other sites, shareable content and Twitter-spe-
cific campaigns? Decide on how you wish to promote Twitter across other channels, either
through displaying your tweets or your Twitter icon to show your audience that you have a
Twitter presence so they can connect with you. It may be across your website, on other social
media channels, within email campaigns or within your blogs.
Here are some ideas to review:
rr Using existing content assets.
rr Sourcing popular, interesting assets from other sources.
rr Running Twitter-specific competitions or promotions and then featuring them in your other
social sites and email.

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rr Specifically developing interesting content that encourages users to retweet.
rr Linking to Twitter from your website, blogs and social presence or using ‘embedded
tweets’ as shown in the Introduction.
rr Adding Twitter sharing buttons within content.
rr Replying to, retweeting or favouriting other people’s tweets.
rr Participating in Twitter chats relevant to your product, service or industry using
designated hashtags. A list of all chats can be found here.
rr Tweeting and outreaching when your audience is most active.
2. Content types that will encourage engagement with brand (covered in ‘Act’)
These are your status updates that will use content to engage and share with your audience
for the purpose of lead or sale generation. Finding a balance of content types that can help
you achieve this engagement will be key to a long-term Twitter communications strategy.
Best Practice Tip 11 Test content types
Test different content types are different points of the day and week to understand the
impact it has on action. Understanding this will help you to plan the content that is most
appropriate for sharing with your audience.
3. Lead generation and sales strategy (covered in ‘Conversion’)
Do you know how tweeting will deliver leads and sales, both directly and indirectly?
Examples of ways in which Twitter is an important tool in new product launches and
campaigns include:
rr Showcase products/launches through content sharing
rr Support campaigns and encouraging conversation e.g. using official #hashtags.
rr Offer discount codes.
rr Reach new customers or make new ones more aware.
rr Remind users to purchase.
4. Frequency/target for updating (covered in ‘Engage’)
You need to decide roughly how many times a day or week you are planning to update. If you
don’t specify this, Twitter updates can wither and die. Of all the social media channels, Twitter
tends to be updated most frequently, so typically this will be at least daily, but so long as the
profile appears active and managed it doesn’t need to be this frequently.
Measuring your Twitter strategy effectiveness using KPIs
Once you have determined your reason for using Twitter and what you wish to achieve, then
set your KPIs, which may be short or long term.
What can you measure?
Katy Howell, Immediate Future advises: ‘For many brands, Twitter is an integrated element in
a wider marketing mix. In this situation metrics focus on more specific elements that can be
evaluated as part of a wider programme. For instance: a brand wanting to increase advocacy,
may look to measure retweets or recommendations. A company wanting to increase
e-commerce traffic will measure click-throughs on links, or traffic to their site.’

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Best Practice Tip 12 Use attribution reports in Google Analytics to review Twitter
contribution
These new reports were launched in 2012. They are the easiest way to find the impact
of Twitter on leads and sales. You can review ‘last click’ conversions and also ‘assisted
conversions’ where a visitor is referred from Twitter initially, but generates a lead or a sale
on a later visit referred from other media such as search.
Some areas to review for Twitter measurement include:
þþ Traffic: Understand the traffic and referrals being generated from social media and other
sites to help you evaluate your visitors.
þþ Engagement: How people are engaging with you on Twitter, via comments, RTs,
mentions and favourites? Knowing this will help you to understand customer loyalty,
satisfaction and the likelihood to switch brands.
þþ Sales: Tracking sales from links shared in Twitter will be relevant for particular
businesses, such as e-commerce sites. Use Google Multi-Channel Conversion Reports to
measure this.
þþ Leads: Non-ecommerce companies measure leads based on online activity and calls to
action. For instance, downloading a brochure, requesting a call back or similar interactions.
þþ Brand awareness: The wider result of sharing your content and understanding the global
reach of your tweets or hashtags. Use TweetReach to gain an estimated exposure.
Do you have specific KPIs to measure?
Site metrics provides an indication of your effectiveness but should be used with other
metrics for a full evaluation of your Twitter use.
Site metrics available directly from Twitter can be summarised in a weekly or monthly
reporting spreadsheet and include:
þþ Number of followers and unfollowers: followed ratio.
þþ Retweets.
þþ Number of replies or engagements.
þþ Number of lists/favourites added.

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Third-party tools can give more metrics and report sharing through time. For example, such
tools can give:
þþ Number of links clicked.
þþ Click-throughs to your site.
þþ Source of referral.
þþ Location of click.
þþ Time of day of click.
Using Google Analytics to measure Twitter
Traditionally, using Advanced Segments in Google Analytics has been the best method to
understand the volume, quality and value of visitors referred from individual social networks.
Today, Google’s new Social Media Reports (available from Traffic Sources > Social) and
Multi-Channel Funnel feature (shown previously) can help you isolate the contribution you
are getting from Twitter and the other social networks already. Look at trends to set targets to
grow the number of visits and sales from the channel.
As well as showing the ‘last click’ conversions from each network that lead to conversions
on the visit, you can also see the ‘assisted conversions’, where conversions may have been
influenced based on previous visits from the social networks.
Strategy Recommendation 5 Use Google Analytics Social Reports or Multi-Channel
Funnels to help prove the value of media throughout customer
journeys
Use ‘Multi-Channel Funnels’ to show you the relative contribution from different social
media referrals comparing number of visits, number of conversions (last click and assisted)
and conversion value.
Comparing the relative number of visits and assists from different social networks can help
you decide where to best put your efforts. At Smart Insights we find that Twitter is highest for
visitor numbers, but LinkedIn is highest for conversion and value.
The Google URL builder tool can help you tag your links before posting them in your tweets
to get an even more accurate view of Twitter conversions since otherwise apps may not
record these. Read Smartinsight’s post to find out more to how Google can help you track
your social media marketing.
Measuring the influence of Twitter activities
There are various third-party tools to provide you with summary information on followers,
number of replies, retweets and other activities to give you an idea of your influence. The
most popular influencer finding tools which also define score algorithms are Klout, and Peer
Index and Kred score to determine the impact of Influence. Each has its own algorithm
which attempts to give the best indication of influence. Klout groups metrics into the following
categories below to measure Twitter for personal and company profiles:

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There are also other free and others paid, to help evaluate your Twitter account or all of your
social media channels. They include TweetDeck, Followerwonk, HootSuite and Tweetmeme
to name only a few.

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THREE
REACH: Reaching your audience through Twitter
Twitter supports companies and individuals to build awareness, amplify their messages and
so reach a wide audience of potential new leads. It can also be used to establish stronger
connections with existing consumers. Through an integrated communications approach, it
can drive visitors to other touchpoints (online and offline) within the organisation to attain
tangible benefits.
In this section, we will discuss how to use Twitter to extend a company’s reach, through
Twitter features such as timeline updates, #hashtags, developing a follower strategy, targeted
advertising, integration with other channels and SEO.
Given Twitter is a strong digital platform to provide real-time updates and so build awareness,
both companies and individuals, including celebrities, are reaping the benefits.
Understanding changing Twitter behaviours
As all social networks start to mature, audiences are evolving. Twitter is no exception and its
user base does not stand still.
To illustrate this:
þþ Active users continue to grow - according to a 2013 study by WebGlobalIndex7
, the
number of active Twitter users grew 40% from Q2 2012 to Q4 2012.
þþ Country adoption changes – most recent numbers for 2013 show Hong Kong, USA and
Russia are leading the way in terms of the Twitter universe.
þþ Age profile changes – the over-55 age segment are the fastest growing demographic on
Twitter growing 116% between Q2 and Q4 2012. In an aging population this represents a
significant audience.
þþ Growth of second-screening – users are not concentrating on one media or device whilst
Tweeting. Integration of official hashtags into TV, films, radio, sports and advertising has
provided people with reasons to use Twitter that go well beyond social.
Encouraging more retweets or sharing of your tweets
It’s simple. The single best way to grow your Twitter following is simply to share content that
others will share. This is the foundation of growing a following in all the social networks.
Best Practice Tip 13 Analyse the most shared types of content in your market and then
share more of this type of content
Review what your followers or those of your competitors share and then find a way of
sourcing more of this type of content. Topsy is a good way to find the most popular tweets
for an account.
To increase followers, be ‘interesting’ and ‘useful’ since people will read your bio and your
tweets. Add useful links and resources to your Tweets and don’t oversell your business.
Always try and retweet good content so you are not ‘hard selling’ yourself or your company
and engage in conversation. To be ‘interesting’ and ‘useful’ requires a sound content strategy.
We will talk more about how to create this in the ‘Act’ Section.
7 GlobalWebIndex Study 2013.

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Even if you are tweeting about your company, then the human touch is key so don’t be afraid
to occasionally tweet about topical issues and interests. Like most social media channels, it is
about ‘engaging’ and ‘connecting’, so always listen and comment and make conversation with
other Twitter users. You may find out new ways of developing your product or services. Treat
this as free customer feedback to help your business, so be open-minded. Customers can
be negative but as a company rise above this and take any negative conversations offline if
necessary.
You need to understand the type of content that is most shareable. That’s one of the reasons
we said you needed to ‘Listen First!’ in the previous Section. Through reviewing what is
shared already by your audience you will see what is popular. Depending on audience it will
likely be interesting, useful or funny. Those who retweet want to look good to their followers.
It’s something to look out for as you audit the profiles of your followers. Find out what your
most popular followers share from other accounts and then give them more of the same.
Even though tweets can only be 140 characters, a good tip is to use a picture – it can portray
a thousand words.
Best Practice Tip 14 Share images and videos
Use photo sharing tools, such as Twitpic, as it can be very powerful to convey a message.
Twitter now features images and videos more prominently within its site, apps and widgets
for embedding in sites, so this can help increase reach.
Using video in tweets
In October 2012, Twitter purchased Vine – a clip sharing app that allows users to create and
share 6-second looping videos.
Vine now offers a way for businesses to produce original content for their own brands, but
also engage with users by means of video media.
Brands can use Vine to:

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þþ Create their own content – show product features, launch new collections, show a
light-hearted personality to their brand, or even showcase behind the scenes footage.
These clips can then be used to engage with customers but also influencers.
þþ Engage with users – asking followers to create their own Vines at official events, video
themselves using their products, or even use Vine as a competition mechanism for
user-generated content.
þþ Embed official links and hashtags to their websites or campaign collateral.
A good example of a brand using Vine is from Topshop who create looks, show off new
products, or release insider clips of fashion events.
Here is a summary of tips on sharing and interacting to help you build your followers:
þþ Be useful and entertaining. Share content which is useful, entertaining and interesting
so people follow you. Remember, this can also be a first impression for new followers, so
give the a reason to follow you.
þþ Participate in chats. Participate in chats using #hashtags to demonstrate your expertise
and knowledge. This will attract new followers and they could become new customers or
advocates to your business. If it is not too forced, try to use your brand name in the chat
so that followers are engaging and reinforcing your voice through Twitter. For example,
#HyattWLFG – Hyatt Hotels World’s Largest Focus Group.
þþ Engage with influencers. Engage and interact with experts or personalities in your
sector or field.

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þþ Share content from other followers. Tweet or retweet content which relates to your
business and share content; it adds value for your own followers.
þþ Answer questions and monitor channels. Engage with similar experts in your field
by answering questions, engaging with ongoing conversations and being friendly – like
networking! It’s good to have different opinions so you don’t have to follow the crowd. But
remember that a reply to someone specific might not be interesting to the more general
public. To avoid this, use “@Reply” in the beginning of a tweet if you only want your
followers who follow them to see the tweet. Add words or a character in front of the @
reply if you want all of your followers to see the tweet.
þþ Cross promote. Include your Twitter profile on other channels, where it will add value to
the customer journey. It may be across your blog, landing pages of your website or other
social media channels like LinkedIn or Facebook. Using your sharing button is also great
for ‘advocacy’ – if your tweet is valuable then people will share your content.
þþ Remember your manners. Say thank you to people for comments on blogs, shares of
your content, or even replies and RTs.
Using #hashtags
Twitter #hashtags give options to expand your reach since some Twitter users will monitor
certain topics and they may then share your tweet if it interests them. To look at it another
way, it’s a way of labelling the topic of a tweet, giving it an obvious context This can give it
more emphasis and encourage people to share it.
Brands can use hashtags to not only identify conversations that are happening and often
trending, but also to direct the conversation for their businesses.
For example, if you search on #LOST (or #Lost or #lost, because it’s not case sensitive),
you’ll get a list of tweets related to the TV show. What you won’t get are tweets that say ‘I lost
my wallet yesterday’ because ‘lost’ isn’t preceded by the hashtag.
What is it? #Hashtag
A #hashtag is a way of labelling tweets and in Twitter or Twitter readers it can be used to
link to search results containing all mentions of this.
Best Practice Tip 15 Use #hashtags in your tweets where relevant
By tweeting using #hashtags used by your audience that relate to your brand, product,
service or event, you can grow your follower base and engage with a large community.
It helps to promote tweets around key campaigns and events which can be used across
different social media platforms and your website.
To find out which hashtag is relevant to your business, there are free tools to help you identify
the right ones for you:
þþ Hashtag.org: It is powered by trendistic allowing you to identify the peak times to use the
hashtags, as far back as 180 days ago. It doesn’t have good coverage of all terms. Topsy
tends to be more comprehensive
þþ Whatthetrend: Provides information by country and city, showing trends and statistics
across Twitter, as well as searches (like Hashtag), to receive related tweets and news by
that keyword.
þþ Trendsmap: Tweets are visualised on a worldmap, drilling down to city on the latest
real-time local trends.
þþ TweetDeck: This tool will help you locate other Twitter users following similar subjects or trends.

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Best Practice Tip 16 Ideas on effective use of #hashtags
Use hashtags to:
þþ Use hashtags to:
þþ Label tweets – to empahsise relevance to a subject.
þþ Share campaign names or specific types of content, e.g. #marketing #infographics.
þþ Start own trends; don’t just piggyback onto others.
þþ Ensure content is interesting, entertaining or educational to encourage sharing.
þþ To integrate with other forms of marketing e.g. tv or outdoor advertising, or special events.
Here are some examples of @ASOS #hashtags which show how they can be used
systematically and creatively:
þþ There’s £500 up for grabs, whoop! RT & follow for your chance to win. #ASOSMidseason-
sale. http://asos.to/SVWvYq
þþ Countdown for #ASOSonXfactor. Free garms, just for seeing us on your fave TV show -
sweet
þþ HURRY, the #ASOSDailyEdit competition finishes real soon.
þþ Fun #LookOfTheDay (and Halloween outfit inspiration: http://goo.gl/xKqKm @Deleving-
nePoppy
þþ Who wants to see a private screening of #DarkShadowsDVD? Tweet a pic of how you
style the gothic trend using #ASOSLoves to win tickets.
Be careful of hashtag hijacking. Hashtags are powerful at promoting events or your products
but sometimes as tags become popular, spammers will target and hijack these keywords and
start ‘spamming’ including irrelevant tweets containing the hashtags. Some brands such as
retailer Habitat have been guilty of this and received negative publicity for it.
The Twitter timeline widget
A Twitter timeline widget shows all tweets by time in a line on your homepage or on the
sidebar of your blog listing your tweets, others who have retweeted or if you have been added
to a list. A recent interactive version developed in 2012 expands to show videos, pictures and
photos associated with the tweets or any associated tweets to the conversation. It is now
possible to interact with those identified on the ‘timeline; tweets, retweets or favourites.
Best Practice Tip 17 Embed your timeline on your site
Embed a HTML code into your website to show your timeline of tweets. It could help
showing tweets around key campaigns or launches. Depending on the relative popularity of
your Facebook and Twitter, it may be better to feature Facebook widgets rather than those
for Twitter.
According to Twitter: ‘These new tools are built specifically for the web: they load fast, scale
with your traffic as your audience grows, update in real time, and work great in modern,
legacy, and mobile browsers.’

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Targeted advertising
Twitter’s advertising features have greatly improved and companies now have the choice of
a variety of targeting through their product offering. However, despite the 2013 IPO, Twitter
ads are generally limited to larger companies. Unlike ads on Facebook, LinkedIn and Google
AdWords, a typical monthly spend of $10,000 is required in many countries. For this reason,
our coverage of Twitter advertising is relatively brief. We hope to expand this in future as
Twitter makes advertising available to smaller and medium businesses
Twitter now offers brands the ability to target:
þþ Promoted tweets - ordinary Tweets labelled as ‘Promoted’ purchased by advertisers who
want to reach a wider group of users or engage existing followers.
þþ Promoted trends – seen in the ‘Trends’ section of the Twitter feed, Promoted Trends
appear at the top of the Trending Topics list - marked as ‘Promoted’. Advertisers can buy
these trends based on time, context or event targeting.
þþ Promoted accounts – these are part of the ‘Who to Follow ‘ section of Twitter suggesting
accounts to people don’t currently follow the brand or to whom it may be of interest.

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Best Practice Tip 18 Review the relevance of Twitter advertising for your brand
For brands with advertising budget to deploy on key campaigns, Twitter’s advertising can
be used to connect with people by their interest, to improve the reach of your Tweets.
There are the options to target by category related to your business as shown below in the
image or via @usernames. Micro-targeting by using @usernames, allows Twitter’s users to
create custom segments with those who have shown an interest in an event, your company,
product, related brands, celebrities or perhaps competition. It allows you to reach beyond
your current followers to engage with your brand.
It is similar to Facebook’s feature to target ads according to the ‘Likes’ of users. However,
it does not enable you to target specific users. Twitter explains: ‘Custom segments let
you reach users with similar interests to that @username’s followers; they do not let you
specifically target the followers of that @username. If you’re promoting your indie band’s
next tour, you can create a custom audience by adding @usernames of related bands, thus
targeting users with the same taste in music.’
Best Practice Tip 19 If you are using promoted tweets then spend time choosing your
keywords

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It is still early days for Twitter’s promoted products so brands are experimenting. It is similar
to Google Adwords, where the advertiser chooses keywords which are relevant to its
brand, product or service. The promoted tweet must be relevant to what the Twitter search
is asking for or it will damage your brand.
Strategy Recommendation 6 Use the Advertiser analytics to review your Twitter advertising
against KPIs
Use the in-built insights function of a Twitter advertising account to track the components of
your Twitter Ads activity. Similar to Facebook insights, learn about the behaviour of people
who interact with your ads and optimise the targeting options.
Ways to connect with people who aren’t following you
Here is a summary of how to successfully follow people who can add value to your brand
through influencing and sharing content, or they could become a new customer:
þþ Retweets: Other Twitter users will see that you are ‘retweeting’ their content, and engage
if relevant.
þþ Conversations: Join in conversations with the friends of your Twitter followers who are
conversing with others, by using @ tag.
þþ Lists: Add Twitter users to your lists. You can engage with them even if they are not
following you. Consider organising your followers into groups and then find similar people
who fit. There are third-party list-building tools including Listorious and Tweetmeme.
þþ Influencer marketing: Profile and identify Twitter users with a strong influence that
will be beneficial to your brand and the sharing of your content. Forming relationships
with these people will strengthen the reach of your brand. We will focus on influencer
marketing later in this step.
Best Practice Tip 20 Use email notifications or if volumes are higher view @mentions and
new followers periodically to identify new influencers to contact
Twitter’s email notifications inform users if they have been retweeted, received mentions,
added to lists or tweets added to favourites.
Creating a follower strategy
When you follow people on Twitter, a proportion will follow back, so through following other
profiles, you will increase your own profiles. Ideally your followers will be larger than the
number following you since this shows your brand is more credible.
Strategy Recommendation 7 Carefully identify who to follow to help grow your followers
It is important to build credible followers on Twitter to increase reach and ensure it’s in
line with your Twitter Strategy to add value, and be a cost-effective use of your time and
resources.
You can start to follow new people if they are interesting, they fit in with your business and
you may like who they are following. Or it may be simply be about connecting with your new
customers to keep them informed with your latest news. Be selective and targeted, so you
are not seen to be ‘spamming’ and lose credibility, which in turn will damage your brand.

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Best Practice Tip 21 Be selective and targeted in defining your followers
It is important to ensure that you follow people with similar interests or who fit with your
client base, or they may have followers who could be influencers of your brand or industry.
It’s not quantity which counts but the quality of followers. Do not use autofollow tools!
Using autofollow tools to grow your followers
A word about ‘autofollow’ tools, ‘Don’t!’ These enable users to rapidly grow their followers by
using software or services that find relevant followers in a category and then automatically
follows them. If some of these users automatically follow back their followers or tend to
manually follow back people who follow them this can lead to rapid growth in numbers – tens
of thousands of followers can be generated.
Understanding who your influencers are
We talk about the importance of influencers in social media marketing at some length in
the 7 Steps Guide to Social Media Marketing, but for the purposes of Twitter will cover is in
this section of this document. It’s also worth taking a look at the Smart Insights Influencer
Outreach Guide since this focuses on using Twitter for outreach since it works better than
any other social network for this!
Strategy Recommendation 8 Segment and prioritise the full range of influencers
You should segment influencers in the same way you segment customers. You can them
prioritise which types of influencers you target since some influencer types will be more
effective for you.
Influencers don’t just have to be individuals. Think about the who is right for your brand (and
audience) in terms of organisations, journalists, bloggers, complimentary brands, celebrities etc.
We take this example from the Smart Insights Influencer Outreach Guide to demonstrate a
suggested approach. You are running a travel business and want to reach a wide audience
who want to rent cottages in France. The chances are it’s going to be very hard to find
potential customers on Twitter that have any of this information in their bios. Therefore, you
need to find people who are having conversations about holiday rentals in France and who
are likely to be followed and mentioned by a large number of potential holidaymakers:
þþ Tourist authorities that share info on particular regions in France (where your cottages are
located), where to go, what to do etc.
þþ Travel writers and bloggers
þþ French property news
þþ British expats who are in France
þþ Ferry companies
þþ The French Consulate
þþ Forums where travellers share their views
These are just a selection of people you could be following.  A simple search on Twitter such
as “Travel Normandy” will help you find the influencers you are looking for, but an easier
way to get ideas it to look at the Twitter accounts of your competitors and see who they are
following. Once you start selecting a few influencers, Twitter will start suggesting others for
you to follow. Just click on the “discover” link on your navigation bar and click on “who to
follow”.

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Best Practice Tip 22 Rate your influencers to prioritise them
As well as rating influencers by Reach, Resonance and Relevance you should also rate
them according to whether you can influence them. For example, it is rare for Seth Godin to
mention, let alone recommend a brand, but an influencer like Chris Brogan will in the right
situation.
Outreaching your influencers
You need to ensure that you appear relevant to the influencers you have identified and would
like to engage with. Again, covered in the Smart Insights Influencer Outreach Guide, you
need to exhibit four key traits in your updates in order to attract the attention of influencers:
þþ You’re informative –keep your target audience updated on the latest developments in
your industry. This gives you credibility by establishing you as having a good knowledge
of your industry.
þþ You educate your audience – give away free insights into your business that prove you
are competent. It might be free legal advice, or information about your manufacturing
process, but it helps influencers make an informed decision about whether you know
what you’re doing
þþ You’re engaging – be open, accessible and friendly. It needs to be clear to you’re inviting

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your audience to interact with you.
þþ You’re visible – be posting updates and discussions regularly in order to be noticed. The
more an influencer sees your updates, the more likely it is that you’ll have a share of your
mind space.
By exhibiting these traits, you’ll enable an audience of complete strangers to know you, like
you, and most importantly, trust you.
Once you’ve got your content right, there are three steps you need to take in order to engage
with influencers:
a. Identify “conversation triggers”, that is opportunities where you can enter the conversation.
b. Reply to content they have posted and share engaging content that will get them to
sit up and take notice
c. Have a strategy and content plan to convert them from being engaged to being brand
advocates
d. Identify ways you could partner, think what you could offer them to make them look
good to their audience or improve themselves in some way.
The key above all else is to resist the urge to sell. When the opportunity arises, engage by
taking an interest in the influencer:
i) Ask them for advice
ii) Comment on something they have said (And don’t be scared to rock the boat!)
Tools for identifying influencers using Twitter
Apart from the paid social media monitoring tools we mentioned in Step 2, there are free
tools you can use to identify influencers to follow and reach out to using these tools and
approaches:
þþ Wefollow - one of the the best directories of Twitter users ranked by number of followers
and influence, for example Wefollow (http://wefollow.com/twitter/digitalmarketing).
þþ The main cross-platform brand reputation assessment tools (Klout, Kred and Peerindex8
).
þþ Brandfluencers (www.brandluencers.com) shows you the influencers who drive the most
visits by connecting to your Google Analytics
þþ Commun.it (www.commun.it) - aspecialist community tool to help you manage your
contacts within Twitter and find others to follow.
The screengrab shows how you can use it for thanking followers for sharing.
8 Smart Insights: Tools for finding influencers.

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þþ Klout (www.klout.com) shows the most influential people and sites on a topic.
þþ Manage Flitter (www.manageflitter.com) – use to manage your followers and find new
followers (Pro version)
þþ Google queries. Use to search for particular types of people9
or locations based on
their bio and Google’s ranking of key twitter accounts limiting results to Twitter using the
site:twitter.com operator, e.g.
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=social+media+marketing+site%3Atwitter.com
Note, though, that this gives preference to Twitter pages with the term in their user name
rather than individual influencers.
þþ Use tools that show the most popular tweets on a topic. Topsy (www.topsy.com) is one
of the most useful tools for this since it not only shows recent tweets like Twitter, but has
older tweets too. It also includes data from blogs and other social networks, so you have
to select ‘Tweets’ from the left menu as shown in this example.
9 Smart Insights: Using Twitter advanced search to find influencers.

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Integrating Twitter with other digital marketing channels
Consider displaying your Twitter content or the channel across other touchpoints, both offline
and online, where it add values to your leads or customers, so they can find out more about
your products, services or latest news in the sector. Remember that your leads or customers
will connect with you in different environments, so make sure they are all covered, where
relevant. It will increase your Twitter visibility both with existing customers and potential leads,
driving traffic to appropriate entry points so you can interact with them further.
You may consider integrating Twitter through incorporating Tweets which show interaction
and value across your:
þþ Website (see the earlier reference to embedded tweets).
þþ Email campaigns.
þþ Event campaigns.
þþ Offline publicity, i.e. programmes, flyers.
þþ Other social networks.
Website integration
Twitter can work two ways with your website: by driving traffic to specific landing pages on
your website for key marketing campaigns; and for capturing leads. It can provide additional
content to those visiting your website, as part of your communications strategy.
There are plug-ins to add to your website to show tweets and mentions for key campaigns
or topics, and it can be helpful to encourage people to engage and interact further with
your brand in another environment as part of your community. It also helps with your SEO
strategy, covered in this section.

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Best Practice Tip 23 Add a plug-in to your website or blog to show your tweets and
mentions
Companies are successfully showing interesting and relevant tweets and mentions on their
website, to help with their SEO strategy and to interact with their website visitors, and to
encourage them to join their community with similar like-minded visitors.
Useful tools to support this include:
þþ Wordpress Twitter widget.
þþ Embedded Twitter Timelines code.
þþ Social plug-in for Wordpress.
Email marketing campaigns
Integrating social media buttons into the content of your email, including Twitter buttons with
key calls to action, can extend the reach of your emails to new audiences as recipients share
interesting content, identify key influencers through email analytics and it helps you to grow
your lists. For your leads and customers, it also creates another platform to connect and
interact with your brand.
Best Practice Tip 24 Integrate Twitter in your email content to share your emails and
connect with your recipients
Include the Twitter social icon in your email with clear benefit-driven messages to connect.
The messages will be tailored to your audience, you can use humour, incentives with
coupons to promote events, or to simply highlight key tweets in your email.
Marketingprofs uses the technique of highlighting interesting tweets to ‘retweet’ which fits
with their community.
Events
Twitter is very effective in promoting both online and offline events for companies, using the
#hashtag or coupons to drive people to either retail stores or exhibitions. It can boost foot
visitors or simply promote an event virally for people to sign up to a key landing page on a
website.
Best Practice Tip 25 Devise online events to engage and add value to your audience
through time
Online events can be regular daily, weekly or monthly features or more specific campaigns.
Starbucks is very successful with their events. With over 2 million followers they will drive
fans into their stores with free drinks or promotions. They are also consistent with their timely
offers through their email campaigns, but many are timebound and specific to Twitter fans.

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In B2B marketing, webinar and online events are growing their registration base and
promoting future events by using Twitter. It is promoted via #hashtags and they live-tweet the
event. It provides reach outside of those purely attending the live event and offers real-time
content and future followers, also helping with SEO.
It’s worth following ASOS for the events which they run, both regular features and more
substantial events like this live chat with the hash tag #styleSOS.
Twitter events
A special class of new event enabled by Twitter are Twitter events where a topic is discussed
over a pre-defined period.
Best Practice Tip 26 Consider Twitter events to build a community and awareness
Some businesses host regular Twitter events for a set period using a hashtag. These work
particularly well for B2B professional services, but can be used as a Q&A in consumer
markets.
To gain an idea of how a Twitter event works see the EcomChat chat hosted by Smart Insights
Expert commentators Dan Barker and James Gurd.
Offline campaigns
Companies highlighting a presence on offline material such as brochures, catalogues,
billboards, etc. extend their brand within the marketplace.
Other social networks
Twitter should be integrated across all of your media channels to share content, engage and
promote your brand. Your audience may engage with different social media channels and
reach your business at different touchpoints.

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Strategy Recommendation 9 Plan an integrated social media strategy and do not plan
Twitter in isolation
Twitter is powerful to support your marketing campaign, and can be integrated across other
social media channels; sharing software, LinkedIn, Facebook, blogs, etc.
SEO strategy
Search engine optimisation can be impacted significantly by using Twitter. It provides the
dual benefit of Twitter links driving direct traffic to your website and sharing (retweeting)
content globally to a new audience. Content will be distributed across a wider audience
and potentially picked up by the media. Media journalists, professionals and bloggers
are constantly seeking new content on stories and will republish online, increasing traffic
throughput and brand awareness.
Best Practice Tip 27 Encouraging retweets can give SEO benefits
Retweeting will indirectly help your company’s search rankings through links from widgets
on other sites (but not Twitter itself since links on Twitter are nofollowed). Of course
retweets also drive extra traffic to your website, or others sharing your content on their
websites and blogs. Content is key so make sure it is relevant and interesting.
Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Land says: ‘Both Google and Bing tell me that who you
are as a person on Twitter can impact how well a page does in regular web search.’
A company who has been successful by improving their search rankings in Google with their
Twitter Strategy is Moz, a developer of SEO tools and resources. Their Twitter account is: @
Moz. With over a quarter of a million followers, they distribute and promote content and use
Twitter to help with customer service. Following this tweet on design publisher site Smashing
Magazine, they ranked on the first page of Google. Prior to this, they were not ranking on this
keyword ‘beginner’s guide’, as it is fairly generic.

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FOUR
ACT: Encouraging interaction with Twitter
There’s a great danger of using Twitter simply as a broadcast tool. You can treat it as a
focused channel for promotional offers like text messages or email blasts and you will get
some take-up of these offers, but this is really missing the power of Twitter as a social
network to share content and ideas and so expand your reach.
How will you interact with your audience and vice versa? It could be to encourage your
audience or influencers to ‘take the next step’ and reach your defined goals. For example,
clicking a link in your tweet, driving traffic to reach your landing page to fill in a form or
register for an event, download a coupon for an instore promotion, to retweet your content or
read your blog.
Strategy Recommendation 10 Plan your content strategy and think about where you are
‘adding value’ to both your business and your audience
Even social media is about defining the online value proposition (OVP) with your calls to
action in your tweets in Twitter – plan, define and communicate the messages within your
content strategy to interact with your audience.
This section will provide tips on how to maximise these opportunities through your content
strategy, which is really your communications plan, and how to use it as part of your public
relations and customer services strategies.
We believe that encouraging ongoing interaction needs a content marketing strategy and
integrated approach to communications.
Here are some ideas to encourage interaction to get us started:
þþ Ask questions around your tweets or those from other brands you follow.
þþ Use competitions based on interaction and sharing, e.g. recommend an XYZ.
þþ Use #hashtags to form discussion.
þþ Interacting with your audience on Twitter, whether it’s through tweeting their name starting
with ‘@’, retweeting to share content or answering customer questions.
þþ Don’t make tweets too long - then they can’t be retweeted once the followers @name is
added on
þþ Ask users to tweet you with pictures or Vine video clips in return for a RT, mention or incentive
Remember: Twitter users actively publish and leave comments on blogs, write product reviews
and more so it’s increasingly important to interact with them positively as they become either
your next customer or will reinforce your brand to a wide audience and ‘sell for you’.

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Statistics in 2011 from a survey from Exact Target figures speak for themselves to show the
influence of Twitter for you and your brand:
þþ 72 per cent publish blog posts at least once a month.
þþ 70 per cent comment on others’ blog posts.
þþ 61 per cent write at least one product review a month.
þþ 61 per cent comment on news sites.
þþ 56 per cent write articles for third-party sites.
þþ 53 per cent post videos online.
þþ 50 per cent make contributions to wiki sites.
þþ 48 per cent share deals found through coupon forums.
Content strategy
Your Twitter communications strategy which includes your content strategy is the same
approach as planning for any other social media or marketing communications plan, to clearly
define its purpose, choice of channel(s) and frequency of communication: For example are
you: showcasing your company? Capturing an enquiry? Promoting an event or competition?
Driving traffic to your website? Or obtaining customer feedback?
We are all taught the value that ‘content is king’ in online media. Think again. It’s true but
everyone with a Twitter account will feel that their content is going to stand out from the
crowd. You need to consider what to tweet, how often and why, to ensure you are interacting
with your audience. Like any communications activity you need to constantly monitor and
evaluate it, refine it accordingly, own up to your mistakes and learn from them!
Here are some tips for your content strategy:
þþ Define the purpose of your message or content, to add value to your customers and
reach your business or campaign goal(s).
þþ Think about your style, tone and voice to portray your messages. Perhaps look at how
your competitors are communicating. Define your own personality in line with your brand
and values.
þþ Consider not just up to 140-character tweets with text. You can share photos and images,
Vines, link to videos, other channels or key landing pages to reach your desired goal.
þþ Using adjectives to highlight the type of content can help it to be found but also entice the
clickthrough e.g. [VIDEO], [INFOGRAPHIC] etc.
þþ Tweet your feature stories: breaking story, quote and longer or short heading.
þþ Tweet enticements ‘in case you missed this’ or ‘coming soon’.
þþ Talk about other brands or new stories and join in, if you feel your followers would be
interested.
þþ Tweets should be part of an overall strategy or individual campaign and have a purpose.
þþ Search and interact with twitter users using @username and add to favourites, to show
you are open to ‘interact’. Defined further in followers’ strategy.
þþ Answer questions and encourage discussion but use quotes sparingly.
þþ Ask followers questions and use their answers in your blog posts, or retweet.
Buddymedia’s report on effective tweeting published in 2012 reinforces the impact of your
content on a company’s engagement strategy: ‘Overall, the most successful brand Tweets
are short (Tweets under 100 characters receive 17 percent higher engagement than longer
ones) and link-based instead of original content (Tweets that contain links received an
amazing 86 percent higher engagement than non-linkTweets). Perhaps surprisingly, requests

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to Retweet prove to work, increasing their engagement by 12 times or more, especially if the
full word (“Retweet”) is used instead of an abbreviation (“RT”).’
Set the right frequency of messages
Timing of tweets is important in the same way it is with TV advertising since you need to
ensure your campaign messages are being displayed at a time when your audience is
available and the message is potentially repeated to have an impact.
It’s difficult to get the balance right if you have a key message to communicate about a
campaign or product launch; you don’t want to spam followers by repeating tweets, but the
short half-life10
of a tweet (c 3 hours) means that you could miss communicating the message.
It can be useful to look at the frequency of tweets of your company and competitors in xefer
(www.xefer.com/twitter) although the retweet number isn’t accurate and it’s based on US
time. This example clear shows preferred times for tweeting. Tweriod (www.tweriod.com) is a
more sophisticated tool that offers the same functionality.
10 Smart Insights: Half-life of different social media

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You can use third-party tools to schedule your tweets and repeat messages, like HootSuite
and Virtue. To help with scheduling, it’s worth reading Chris Soames’s blog post on Smart
Insight’s website for the most popular tools being used at the moment to schedule tweets.
Best Practice Tip 28 Reach your audience when they are free to talk with you or will pick
up your message – what is best for them as well as yourself?
Scheduled tweets can help you reach your audience when they are ready to interact and
help you manage. Use the auto-scheduling feature in HootSuite or tools like Buffer to assist
with this.
A practical approach to emphasise key messages is to use a different tweet about the offer
or campaign marked with a common hashtag to emphasise it. @asos use hash tags to
emphasise a promotion, for example, #midseasonsale.
It’s worth planning a Twitter schedule by time and day, in an excel sheet, to remind you when you
are tweeting during the day, week or month. For overseas audiences, remember the time difference,
just as you would schedule your email campaigns. Some say to tweet at least five times a day but
not in the same hour if it’s relevant – all commonsense which doesn’t always prevail!.
Buddymedia (with Salesforce), published a report which looked at ‘Effective Strategies for
Tweeting’ around scheduling. Findings reported that scheduling can vary according to industry.
It reported that the Entertainment industry which is tweeting on Sundays and Mondays are
receiving 23 per cent higher engagement than average. Whereas, publishing companies
tweeting on Saturdays are achieving 28 per cent higher than average rates. Overall, companies
tweeting during the day and are attaining 30 per cent higher engagement rates between 8am
and 7pm. So it’s worth evaluating and investing the time in this!
PR strategy
Companies are aware that defining the online PR strategy is important for SEO but are not
quite ready for it, as evidenced by Chris Lee’s blog. Though, by defining a listening strategy
you can gain insights into your brand, products and customers to help with your Twitter
strategy. Find out what people are talking about, how they are using keywords and hashtags;
use this to engage in conversation and start conversations. Read Chris Soames’s blog
provides useful information on how to create a plan for Social Listening.
Eurostar is an example of a company who learnt the hard way when they set up Twitter
as a marketing channel to purely push out messages. When they had a train crisis, their
customers were tweeting for real-time information but no one was replying. A year later,
their Senior Press Officer Aude Criquie announced: ‘They have turned about the negative
comments with a solid social media strategy. Before 2010 we used social media mainly as a
marketing channel, and not as a corporate communications or customer service tool. It was a
missed opportunity, and since then we’ve listened and moved on.’
Another example of a brand using Twitter for real-time information is @SW_Trains who
provide passengers on the South West Trains network with regular updates to journeys,
delays and track maintenance.
Customer service
Companies are also using Twitter for customer service if it’s backed up that their customer
insight is showing that their audience is using this channel. It can provide your company with
huge benefits to answering customer queries with a cost-effective channel rather than via a
call centre or doubling up, to reduce the strain on staff at peak times.

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It can also provide real-time information and consistence messages with new and existing
customers if it’s embedded across your organisation. Depending on the size of your
company, it can be integrated with your online frequently asked questions (FAQs) and
advanced customer relationship management (CRM systems), to ensure consistency and to
manage peak times questions, setting and managing customer expectations.
If you are offering customer service as you likely will, it’s worth considering:
þþ How quickly you are able to answer your customers’ questions and how you communicate
your service levels in your profile bio?
þþ How to personalise the customer experience? To add a personal touch, you can end your
tweets with your personal name and/or for small businesses you could even use your face
with the company logo:
þþ How to build a relationship? Brands such as @npower and @VirginAtlantic use a
consistent format to tell the user who is responding to customer enquiries.

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A good example of a company committed to using Twitter for customer service by exceeding
customer expectations is Best Buy and Twelpforce (@Twelpforce, @BestBuy, @BestBuyUK).
Best Buy have a Twelpforce account on Twitter, where their employees use their company
and Twitter ID to register, and all employee tweets are streamed into one account across their
network of staff. It still allows customers to connect to an individual person and to view their
profile.
Their strategy is focused on retention to build customer relationships and for acquisition,
through running competitions and free prize giveaways for retweeting, links or using
#hashtags.
Best Buy also monitors Twitter for brand mentions and reaches out to try to solve these
problems. Kerry Bridges, Social Media Manager of Dell has said that around three-quarters
of Dell’s Twitter service is in this category.
Best Practice Tip 29 Don’t expect service enquiries to go straight to your profile
Monitor brand mentions and reach out to try to ameliorate negative experiences.

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FIVE
CONVERT: Turning Twitter interactions into leads and sales
Twitter will help your company gain new enquiries or leads but they will not add value to your
bottom line, unless your content links to sale. Of course, you also need a good conversion
strategy to convert followers into customers.
It’s a matter of getting the balance right between sharing on Twitter and offering promotional
lines.
It can take time to develop a long-term relationship, in particular with new customers, before
they will commit to purchasing your product or service. Be patient and provide them with a
good experience and useful content information that represents your company. Then, when
they are ready to either buy into your company or perhaps refer you to a friend it’s worth
the time, you know they have a good experience of your brand. Don’t forget your existing
customers too.
This section will discuss how to improve conversion, using your retweeting strategy and
reinforcing the importance of link building. Integration with other channels is covered in the
content strategy in the ‘Act’ section.
Retweeting strategy
Retweeting is where another Twitter user will either copy your original tweet or add their own
commentary, customising it with colour or images, and sharing this content on Twitter or
across other social media channels. It is abbreviated to ‘RT’.
It is great for extending your audience, increasing your brand, gaining more credibility with
your area of expertise and, in turn, increasing your customer base/sales and acknowledge-
ment of good content. Another benefit is that it will encourage new tweeters to follow you
back if you have acknowledged their content.
There are mixed opinions about retweeting your own tweets. Some experts advise against
it whereas others suggest you trial it. Why? There are thousands of tweets out there and
sometime your own tweets are not read by even your own followers, so you can retweet
occasionally as a reminder message.
Best Practice Tip 30 Encouraging commentary on retweets is powerful
Leave extra space on your tweet to allow others to comment as it adds credibility and
positive comments, and encourages more followers.
How to retweet
1. Autoretweet: click the retweet button. Automatically it retweets the message along
with the original Avatar attached to the tweet.
2. Manual process: copy and paste the message from the original Tweet. You copy
and paste the tweet, and precede it with ‘RT’.

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How to increase your retweets
Here are some tips on how to boost your retweets and it’s worth reading the guide from Dan
Zarella, who works at Hubspot, on how to quantify this.11
It overlaps with the content strategy advice in Section 4 ‘Act’, so only a few will be
summarised below to reinforce the importance:
þþ Less is more: leave space for your @username, follower comments and for ‘RT’. Use ‘RT’
even though it’s not necessary in the new feature as it returns a higher volume of retweets.
þþ Timing: scheduling at the optimal time (as mentioned previously).
þþ Content quality: add value with interesting and informative content, with good links.
Where relevant, use images, photos or links to videos. Quality persuasive headlines are
also important.
þþ Add personalisation: Twitter users are more responsive to personalised tweets with
words such as ‘you’.
þþ Shortened URLs: you only have 140 characters to use it wisely. This also helps others
retweet you and provides quantitative analysis on your clicks. A tool such as Bit.ly Pro is a
good tool to use.
þþ Use adjectives: they improve content and when retweeted it looks as though followers
have added the adjective and it gives more credibility.
For more tips, read the July 2011 blog by Stephen Waddington, Managing Director of Speed
Communications. His research findings showed that more than 20 per cent of Twitter users
are spammers, so it’s important to prune your network regularly to sort out these issues.
Converting leads to sales through integration
This guide has covered in great detail the importance of content and integrating Twitter with
other channels, but ultimately, it’s all about the bottom line to the business – sales.
Here are some specific ideas on encouraging sale:
þþ Drive traffic to your website for specific promotions. It’s a matter of balance.
Although you shouldn’t oversell, you shouldn’t undersell either. If you have a great offer
or a campaign you should mention it as a teaser, then provide the link and follow-up
too. But don’t overdo it. Of course, you should direct to specific landing pages. Here you
will be able to capture their details including email for example for a competition, drive
them to the shopping cart, or simply to request a call back or instant messenger live chat
when you can take their order. In addition, ensure your deepen engagement with clear
navigation on your website and ensure your pages are fully optimised.
þþ Use of images and photos. You may add photos or images to your tweets to display
your products and then drive them to your point of sale.
11 Dan Zarrella: The Science of Twitter..

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þþ Invites to events. Depending on your business, some companies convert their enquiries
through either online webinars/events or through invitations to specific onsite events.
Some consumers prefer face-to-face contact or to speak to someone if they are new to
the brand or it’s an expensive product, or a technical product. Perhaps, link your tweet to
a registration form on your website, drive them to your CRM system or provide an offer to
drive them to a store for a timely discount for their first purchase.
For online events, tweeting the event generates a wide audience and encourages the
sharing of content, and they will have the opportunity for live chat. There are now iPhone
Apps to help you tweet quicker.
þþ Competitions and offers. Twitter will allow you to promote short-term campaigns
only available on Twitter for a limited time. It also supports capturing your leads and
encouraging people to experience your product or service, encouraging purchase.
Producing Twitter coupons can be used to print off, shown on their phone with a unique
code or used online. Using TwtQpon is one way to run Twitter coupon campaigns with
mitigated risk of codes becoming viral.
Companies are using Twitter successfully to add value to their bottom line. Dell announced
in 2012 that it reaped $3 million from Twitter-related sales. Primarily, it sells refurbished sales
through @Delloutlet. Their success is attributed to sending tweets to subscribers, tweeting
about their cost-effective systems, and providing coupons and clearance events.
In 2012, MTV Awards increased their viewers by nine per cent through Twitter, receiving
over 10 million tweets, 3.37 million mentions of hashtag #VMA and driving 128,000 people
to follow their MTV account on the day of the event. How? They prepared an integrated TV
and Twitter campaign to provide an interactive experience using mobile and online ‘Twitter
tracker’, using promoted trends. 2012 wasn’t an exception either, as demonstrated by the
2013 VMAs. Find out more from their article.

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SIX
ENGAGE: Keeping your audience engaged
Managing publishing for your Twitter profile
Like all social media tools, you have to create dialogue and interact with your audience to fully
‘engage’– not just push out mass messages as a one-way broadcast channel! It is crucial
that your organisation has an integrated communication plan as part of the overall marketing
strategy, your company is ready to embrace cultural change and management is ready to it
back up with the required resources and commitment.
Strategy Recommendation 11 Be committed to a long-term engagement strategy
Don’t expect results over night as with most social channels. Connect with your followers,
your audience and encourage discussion to build a long-term relationship. It can take time
to build relationships and measure the impact.
You may wish to simply engage with your customers, potential new clients or influencers
who could impact your brand such as the media or advocates. Be clear about who you are
engaging and building relationships with.
The profile of the Twitter user
It is important to remember that whilst aiming for direct interaction with your Twitter followers,
there is also a growth in ‘active passive’ users. The WebGlobalIndex study showed that only
51% of active users claim to have posted a tweet in the past month, which means that half
the active user base is just reading, reacting or using Twitter as a source of discovery. This
means that whilst harder to test, your content strategy should incorporate levers to appeal to
even the users that don’t demonstrate engagement.
To help illustrate this, Amia conducted a study into the 6 types of social media user, analysing
the behavioural characteristics of different social media persona types and how best to
elicit engagement. The types were defined as no shows, newcomers, onlookers, cliquers,
mix-n-minglers and sparks.

Twitter marketing guide

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