Twitter Can and Should Be Used for Marketing and PR

By Oleh Rozvadovskyy

These days, social networks, including Twitter, cannot be ignored by marketing and PR agencies. Isn’t it fascinating that your message can be delivered to existing and potential customers via personal communication?

There are several methods of commercial communication via Twitter:

The simplest way is called “mass-following”: you create a special promo account in Twitter and then add other people to the “followed”. This method suggests that you would be followed in response by the people you follow and then you can deliver your post to all these people. But “mass-following” has poor efficiency because of its similarity with spamming – you receive messages you don’t anticipate or solicit. Therefore, you should use it very carefully.

Paid materials

The traditional way of communication in social networks is when popular bloggers get paid for commercial posts. Your message seems to be delivered to all the readers of this blog. You can get access to people with thousands of followers and share some specific ads or promo materials. But after a while, these bloggers begin to lose their audience, and therefore, this approach has also proved its inefficiency. Some companies, especially in the post-Soviet world, still try to employ popular bloggers for promoting their brands, or even pay PR agencies to do so. As a result, they receive a “big bubble” – good stats, but poor sales. No one likes to be forced to buy something he or she wasn’t planning to do.

Nowadays, it becomes obvious that the most efficient marketing in Twitter is when the requirements of the audience are not ignored. That’s why, the most popular ways of advertising in Twitter these days are viral marketing (videos or other media content you would like to share with your friends) and key-words surveys.

Contextual interaction is one of the new waves in communication with customers. You don’t create your own delivery channel, but use already existing topics to deliver your messages. As a result, your product becomes a part of a wider context. Contextual interaction is considered one of the most progressive methods.

And the last, but, in our view, the best way of interaction with customers via Twitter is when you observe opinions and feedback about your product. As a rule, most of feedback in social networks is negative, but should you really think of changing something completely if everybody is satisfied? Collecting negative information about your company and/or your product from personal profiles sometimes can tell you much more than expensive marketing surveys, because it goes directly from your customers and has nothing changed or re-arranged by experts and analysts.

We have explored several ways of using social networks, and all of them are applicable to most popular services, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and others.

The essence of mass-following and paying the bloggers is obtrusion, and nowadays, they are regarded as old-fashioned and counter-productive.

The content and context communications are good ways to deliver your messages to the wider audience. They are more complicated than mass-following or paid articles, though.

Finally, feedback analysis is the two-way interaction between a company and its customers, which is very good for improving this company’s products and/or services.

Appropriate use of these tools can and will bring new customers to your company and will increase loyalty of existing ones, if you don’t treat this as some fashionable toy of course.