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How are businesses using Twitter?

Update, June 2009 – see my review of O’Reilly Book on developing Twitter business strategy.

Everyone is familiar with the rapid growth in followers of celebrities such as @stephenfry and @britneyspears on Twitter. As the chart from Twitter Counter shows there has been an acceleration in adoption in 2009 has celebs have used offline media to drive their followers.

twittercounter1

You may also have seen my post on the top digital marketers (consultants, publishers and agencies) to follow on Twitter – this shows how many digital marketers are learning from each other through Twitter.

But how are businesses using Twitter? And is Twitter worthwhile for all types of business? In this post I will review some examples of how companies from the UK and US are using Twitter in different categories of benefits.

How Dell use Twitter for different business applications

Before I look at different types of business applications, Kudos to Dell who have enthusiastically adopted Twitter AND integrated it into other Web 2.0 features such as Ideastorm customer feedback, blogs and videos through their Dell on Twitter page: www.dell.com/twitter.

- Dell Outlet (Promotions) : 71,000 followers

- Direct to Dell (blog syndication) : 1,800 followers

Feeds are segmented by customer type: company / personal and country. Numbers of followers are small, but many are just syndicating from an existing RSS feed using Twitterfeed, so providing more customer choice.

Different types of company marketing applications of  Twitter

Using Twitter for branding

My favourite example of brand use of Twitter, which may be unfamiliar to US readers is the Comparethemeerkat – a brand campaign for ComparetheMarket.com which is in the deathly dull and highly competitive insurance quotes market.

comparethemeerkat

The brand personality here is  http://twitter.com/Aleksandr_orlov who has 5,000 followers, but more importantly is part of a great example of customer engagement which has seen the site double the number of daily visitors according to Google Trends.

googletrends

Other brands on Twitter have had variable success. It seems it works best when there is a CEO brand personality such as @richardbranson (30,000 followers)

Customer service via Twitter

Comcast personalises this through the blog by presenting posts from Frank Eliason, Comcast Director of Digital Care http://twitter.com/comcastcares (10,000) followers

With a slightly different take B2B CRM company Salesforce.com post customer success stories http://twitter.com/successforce (800 followers)

Market research

Similar to Dell Ideastorm, Starbucks uses Twitter to ask customers about ideas and to highlight promotions: http://twitter.com/mystarbucksidea (1,800 followrs)

Event marketing

Event organisers are successfuly using Twitter to promote their events – e.g. @tfma_event , @UXlondon, @w2e (7,000 followers)

Retailer use of Twitter

Retailers have limited success with Twitter in turns of number of followers suggesting it is not worthwhile for most unless it is an alternative channel for customer service, customer feedback or discounted promotions.

Publishing

Publishing is where Twitter excels, particularly for the latest as with http://twitter.com/bbcbreaking (29,000 followers). The Twitter top 100 shows many news organizations such as CNN Breaking , The New York Times and The Telegraph within the Top 100 amongst the celebrities.

In online business publishing and analysis, particularly with a tech audience a Twitter feed with contributions from different analysts or journalists is definitely worthwhile as this listing of business/tech analysts shows. Forrester analyst http://twitter.com/jowyang has over 32,000 followers.

Conclusion – should our business be on Twitter

So is worth twittering for business? As always, the answer is "€œit depends"€. But the short answer is “probably not”.

Certainly, if you have a popular blog, a publisher or a smaller business positioning yourself as innovative, I definitely recommend offering Twitter as an choice for your subscribers beyond email and RSS feeds.

Use Twitterfeed to automatically syndicate your blog postings, but don"€™t just push stories "€“ remember to elicit feedback and participate. Twitter is also useful for web startup companies and larger agencies to position their business.

The costs needn’t be too high since you are repurposing or resyndicating content from feeds, but you will need to control staff costs since some will get distracted from their main job.

Otherwise, I believe Twitter won’t have a dramatic incremental impact on your business in terms of building the brand, customer service or sales since most of the options that Twitter provides can be equally provided through the main site, email alerts or a blog. That’s why most retailers have limited numbers of followers on their Twitter accounts – there are better options available for the customer.

But  if you want to give customers choice, reach brand advocates and journalists and so improve perception of the brand, Twitter is a good low-cost addition to your digital marketing communications.

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  • http://twitter.com/guy1067 Guy Stephens

    Interesting posting, and it’s great that there is a growing awareness of what businesses are doing with Twitter or other social media tools. A few of my own observations as follows, if I may offer them.

    a) The overall view seems to be that twitter has a limited benefit for a business. I don’t believe this to be the case. I think it’s still early days in the way businesses use twitter, and we shouldn’t dismiss it that simply. Twitter is just one tool of a number that a business might choose to use. It won’t be relevant for everyone, but it’s worth trying to understand and experiment to see whether it does have a relevance to engaging with your customers.

    b) So often the commentary about how twitter is used by businesses comes from people on the outside looking in; perhaps a bit more transparency from businesses about how they are using it might help also. I agree that it’s still early days with twitter and it’s not every customer who uses it, but I know from personal experience of using twitter every day at work, it is presenting me with new challenges in the way I engage with customers, and how I respond to them. Overall though, it is helping me to understand my customers more and more. I actively use twitter (@guy1067) every day from a customer service perspective in the work I do at Carphone Warehouse. I proactively try to help resolve issues or complaints that people might have about the service they have received from us, sometimes we can turn the situation around for our customers, and sometimes we can’t and we just have to be upfront and say to our customers ‘I’m sorry, we got it wrong’. But overall, I believe I’m in a far better place for adopting twitter than not, and so are the people who are using twitter to communicate with Carphone Warehouse.

    c) And now for the exciting bit. I believe that twitter, or the concept of twitter, together with the growing ubiquity of smartphones, is heralding the beginnings of real-time customer service: the possibility to help customers wherever they are resolve a problem they might be having at any time. Of course, this takes a lot for granted, but that shouldn’t stop us exploring and experimenting.

    • http://www.davechaffey.com Dave Chaffey

      Thanks for the detailed comment Guy, it’s great to hear your positive views on Twitter for customer-service / customer understanding application – we can see from the number of Comcast followers that it works.

      I was going to mention the Getsatisfaction customer service portal which now has employees as well as non-employees fielding the questions – that’s certainly an exciting development – one of the best examples of “Web 2.0″.

      Coincidentally i was posting on this negative article about Twitter for Business this morning and although I agreed that most businesses should adopt a waiting brief, I did say:

      “The exceptions are for publishers and hi-tech customers who need to offer responsive service…It can also be a great way for small businesses/startups to build a profile and engage niche audiences/advocates”.

      So I was thinking that service could be important for the right type of company – it sounds as if Carphone Warehouse could be that type of company.

  • http://www.craig-west.co.uk Karl Craig-West

    Thanks for the great information Dave.
    I’ve been using Twitter for a while and am beginning to see the business benefit so it’s encouraging to hear of companies making good use of the facility.

    Cheers,
    Karl
    Training in Leicester and the East Midlands

  • http://marketingdonutblog.co.uk/ Mark Hook

    After a cautious start, our company has really embraced Twitter as a vehicle for helping promote our new Marketing Donut website.

    I think the problem a lot of companies have is that you don’t you don’t necessarily see instant results from Twitter, and it’s such a new form of “marketing” that people are instantly skeptical. I’ve found that if you put time in, you will begin to see results – our company has been actively using Twitter for over a month, and its only now that we are being to see real traffic people diverted to our blog.

    Its like anything, put in the effort – the results will come eventually.

    Visit our blog – http://marketingdonutblog.co.uk/

  • http://www.andrewjrobinson.net Andrew Robinson

    I think you’ve also missed out an important example, which is the US Skittles home page, which combines lots of social media elements, including a feed on tweets tagged with Skittles. I think this is a bold move, but a good one. It’s about Skittles becoming a repository for all the social media conversations that are going on about the brand. It’s also a refreshing break for a FMCG site. So I think there is another way businesses can use it – as a way to collect together and direct the conversations that are happening across twitter.

    The obvious questions is, though, what’s going to get me tweeting about Skittles, so an integrated campaign is essential.

    I’ve expanded on these issues a bit on a post on my blog here.

    • http://www.davechaffey.com Dave Chaffey

      Hi Andrew, Yes, I didn’t really look at the FMCG angle. It’s been good to see Skittles “embracing / becoming part of the conversation” rather than ignoring it.

      There was a lot on Twitter last week about the Skittles Twitter waterfall, but it seems that was just to get some buzz going amongst the Twittersphere which I suspect isn’t the target market for them. By chance we were looking at it in a training session today and as you say it’s now much more of a portal with YouTube content/discussion, etc. I think that’s a stronger approach than the Twitter waterfall. But I do wonder whether the more straightforward offer-led approach of a brand such as http://www.bk.com might not work better for their target audience.

  • http://www.spongenb.com Steve Fair

    We’re a very small company and have been on Twitter properly for about a month. It’s seen us set up one partnership with a small agency who saw us on there and visited our web site and today we had a nice email from a Design Agency who want to meet to discuss a project with us.

    We tend to Tweet a mix of messages – very occasionally I’ll put up a simple sales message – this morning saw one of those go up – and mainly I’ll stick to links to interesting news articles or my own musings. Once a week (or thereabouts) we’ll identify a lead that doesn’t fit any of our clients and offer it for free on Twitter, with some sort of response criteria (one agency sent us a poem!).

    The result of this has been an increase in web traffic. We don’t see a huge number of hits – our site is mainly for marketing agencies who understand what we do (Dave, you actually met me four years ago, with Ripe Design!) so any increase is welcome. At the moment, Twitter gives us as many hits as our Google Adwords activity and natural seach results.

    We’re trying our best not to bore people on there and we have tended to “ReTweet” users that we identify with. We’ve also answered several questions posted by other users. To find users who we’ll be interested in, we use Monitter and TweepSearch. We monitor clicks on our links using Hootsuite. It’s a good thing we’re there – our competitors are either absent or jsut using it as an advertising board.

    • http://www.davechaffey.com Dave Chaffey

      Hello again Steve,

      Thanks for sharing these Twitter monitoring tools and your approach to using Twitter from an agency viewpoint – useful. This is how they can be used:

      Monitter – use to identify potential tweeple to follow on Twitter (and also brand mentions)
      TweepSearch – Great for segmenting your followers – enter your twitter address and search for comments on a particular product category
      Hootsuite – used for tracking clickthrough on Twitter links (and RTs)

      Any more anyone?

  • eric schodde

    I loved this article among many others that I have read. I have a strong belief that Twitter can be a very effective tool in social marketing. That being said,…I think it’s strengths lie in it’s ability to effectively communicate with repeat consumers. What about customers that perhaps…purchase a swimming pool and you may not hear from again until 15 years from now? Once a pools is sold…we love to service them and will..but in a more effective way, say…via phone or email. I see a Blog on this being more effective than anything to perhaps generate new interested and serious swimming pool buyers to a degree. It could address a current pool being built, homeowner feedback, etc…..but aside from that, you have to have someone constantly monitoring feedback from tweets

  • http://www.kungfudigital.co.uk Illiya Vjestica

    Another great post Dave.

    However I think you’ve missed out some brands using Twitter well from a Retailing standpoint.

    Clothing retailers such as:
    @ASOS 7,887 followers
    @river_island 1,515 followers

    Both are using Twitter to build brand awareness and loyalty by creating a community around their customers. ASOS especially are using their own staff to be champions of their brand to market and to involve customers in feedback on products and promotions.

    Firebox (the online gadget retailer) is another fantastic example of how to use Twitter correctly.

    @firebox 4,817 followers.

    I myself find their tweets very interesting, not only have they successfully built an online community on Twitter, but successfully sell products to consumers. I myself have bought products from seeing them posted on Firebox’s twitter feed.

    Two other great ways they have also used twitter for their companies benefit.

    1. They released a preview version of their re-designed website to get feedback from their Twitter followers on the new website design. They then used this feedback to improve the overall re-design before final launch.

    2. The have previewed products they are thinking about stocking at Firebox to followers on Twitter to get their opinions and feedback, thus allowing them to choose a product with high interest which they already know will be successful.

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