How to use Twitter, A Marketer’s Perspective

Posted on 15 December 2009

We hear this question a lot.  Social Networking, especially Facebook and Twitter, are becoming mainstream, but.. how can my business use twitter?  I see three potential scenarios: to connect with a community, understand what people are saying about a brand, and for research to develop fresh and relevant content for SEO.  Each has particular measures that help prioritize the information we care about most, and potentially, a tool that will help get us there.

Use some keyword research to identify a group of keywords your site (or brand) is targeting.  Then, put these into a twitter search tool.  This process can be as simple or complicated as you need it to be for your business.  Only targeting a handful of keywords?  A manual check once a week may provide plenty of useful data.  Targeting the long tail?  You may need to look into some tools to automate this process.

1. Blogger Relations: Use twitter search to find the ‘sneezers‘ in your niche, and connect with these people however possible (via twitter, their blog, email, or gasp.. via telephone or in person.)
   • Mavens: People who talk about your space a lot.  These are the likely the leading-edge, early adopter folks who know your product inside and out. They’ll give you insight on your product, the space, and the competitive environment.  (as a quick aside, Erik von Hippel’s book on the Sources of Innovation is available for free download as a PDF.)
     • Maven Share of Voice = # of maven tweets / Total tweets for a given timeframe, using a given keyword search.
     • Maven Mind Share = # of keyword tweets / Total Maven Tweets for a given timeframe.
   • Connectors: People who talk about your space occasionally, but have a lot of reach.  Look to see who is talking about your keywords and also has a ton of followers.  They may be a little harder to get a hold of, but these folks are worth reaching out to if you’re interested in how to better promote your brand.  A great example of this is a post Tim Ferriss recently wrote outlining 13 Christmas gifts he’d recommend. Give these people samples!
     • Connector Reach = # of followers  (yeah, this one’s sloppy, I know)
2. Brand Monitoring: Probably one of the more frequent marketing uses of social media is ‘Monitoring.’  Use a social media tool, google alerts, or simple keyword searches to listen to what people are saying about the brand, and how often.
   • Share of Buzz = # of tweets including your brand /  # of tweets in the keyword space.  Metrics like this are only interesting if you trend them over time, or compare them to competition.  This type of analysis could be interesting when crafting Marketing Messaging or SEO keyword strategy for your site.  Does share of buzz = share of wallet?  Nope.  Still worthwhile?  Yep.
   • Brand Mentions. Is there a correlation between brand buzz and press releases, blog posts, etc?  Which vehicles or promotions drive the most brand interaction?
3. Content Development & Research: Maybe it’s my SEO bias, but this is easily the most overlooked use of twitter.  Part of an SEO plan is to write new, relevant content for a site.  Doing some research on twitter helps you find the intersection of what’s hot and what my brand is about.  Extremely useful for content development.
   • Top-linked pages during a timeframe – use the API to pull down the most-posted links for a day.  Some of these will be duplicated, others will be retweeted.  With a bit of filtering, the most-posted links will probably give you a good indication of the hottest topics within your space at a given time (ie Google’s citation method).  Comment on these blogs, write about these topics.  Head towards the intersection.

Note the omission of spamming the hell out of your prospects using an automated tool.

How does your business use twitter?