In this interactive workshop, you will have an opportunity to learn how twitter plays an important role in how we create meaningful dialogue, relationships, and sales for the business.
While many people become intimidated by the 280-characters and constant updates, you will gain confidence in the following areas:
- Building a Twitter profile that attracts the right audience
- Measuring analytics: how to allow your analytics to drive your content online
- Capitalizing on trends to create conversations around your brands
- Customer Service Etiquette 101
- How to Use Twitter Lists to Your Advantage to research competition, customers, and prospective customer
Speaker: Katie Browder-Person, CEO and Lead Marketing Consultant of Katbro Ltd.
About The Speaker:
Katie Browder- Person has over 10 years of hands-on Marketing and Community Relations experience. Her experience includes organizing press conferences, media relations, brand development, and community relations. In 2013, Katie decided to turn her love for freelancing into a REAL business, KatBro Ltd, where she could assist growing entrepreneurs like herself to find their voice in the online and offline marketplace.
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VIDEO TRANSCRIPTIONS
How To Rock Twitter For Business
All right, so welcome to how to rock Twitter for your business. And the biggest thing that I’ve noticed with individuals when it comes to Twitter is people don’t really know what to do with Twitter. So I think that many people and I actually heard someone say this the other day, they’re like, oh, Twitter, Twitter’s kind of dying. But the thing about Twitter is it’s not really dying. If you know how to use it, you know?
Twitter is an extremely valuable resource for your social media. All social media is not created equal. Every platform has its pluses. Every platform has its minuses. Whether however, 8as you’ll see here shortly, the best platform for you to do customer engagement. It is also the best platform for you to do brand reputation management, as well as an amazing platform for you to show your audience that you’re staying up to date on current events.
That brings me to our lesson objectives.
Lesson Objectives
Here’s what you’re going to learn today. We’re going to learn how to build a Twitter profile that attracts the right audience. And we’re not going to spend a ton of time building the profile, because I’m pretty sure most of you know how to put a Twitter profile together, but you might not be using the right words you may not know about keywords, so I’m going to kind of highlight that for you today.
We’re also going to dive into capitalizing on trends, to keep conversations around your plan and keeping your brand relevant with whatever’s going on with current events. We’re also going to look at real-time social media versus scheduling. How they both can kind of coincide together for your brand strategy, so you can offer that amazing customer service, I know you guys offer for your businesses, and then we’re going to dive a little deeper into how to use Twitter, and your customer service, and keeping your brand reputation.
So let’s get started.
Tweet Your Questions
Okay, so during this training, I will actually have Twitter open and you can use the hashtag #cultivatelivestream. I will not answer those questions during the course. But what I will do is after the class, I’ll go into my Twitter.
Check what everybody has been asking the entire time and then you know, make sure that I follow up with you. Brings me to something I just remembered.
See, that’s the cool thing about today is we’re all going to be relaxed. We’re all gonna be friends and you’re gonna see me sometimes mess up too and I actually forgot to open my Twitter account. There you go!
Why Use Twitter
So first, you might want to ask yourself, so why to use Twitter really, you know, I know people who, you know, they tweet often and they don’t feel like they’re getting necessarily the feedback that they want. So they’re just trying to figure out like, why am I using this platform? So here are really some of the key reasons why you’ll want to use Twitter in your marketing strategy.
One, it offers you great brand exposure. Twitter is a social vehicle that is followed closely by the media so if you are a business or organization that does a lot of events, or if you have a product that you’re launching, or if you simply want to get that media exposure, you’ll want to be on Twitter for the simple fact that it’s where the media is at.
I actually used to have a young lady that worked for me for about two or three years. She actually helped me put this Twitter piece together many years ago and we, you know, we’ve been updating it together ever since but her primary job was to she worked for a new station in Cincinnati. And her primary job was to sit on Twitter, and see what was happening in the world. See what people were posting. That’s how they stayed up to date on their current events. So with knowing that kind of insider information, you understand that Twitter can be an amazing tool for you to get your brand out there to the world.
Twitter is also a great way for you to nurture that grand reach again, not just with the media, but with the rest of the world. You know, especially with other industry leaders, that are you know, in your stain industry, so, of course, I’m in the marketing industry and I go out on Twitter, and I see all these other amazing marketing agencies tweeting all the time. And we can share ideas. We can, you know, kind of cross-promote one another. Maybe there’s an agency that’s doing something better than me or vice versa. Like who’s doing something better than me right.
Now, but you know, it’s a way for us to kind of stay involved. It’s also a way for me to share information from my favorite authors because lots of authors and artists are on Twitter. So those are big demographics for them as well. Just kind of a side note. If you have a male audience, Twitter tends to be a male’s go-to social media as well. So Twitter is a great place for you to kind of like touch up on guys. Normally between the demographics of 21 and 40. So it’s a good demographic for you to kind of catch up on that particular age group in the male demographic. Also, Twitter’s a great way to engage your customers. There are many pages and I will show them to you as we go along there are many national companies that have Twitter pages that are simply designated for customer service. So you know, we’ll talk about this a little bit later.
Also, it’s a great way for you to acquire brand leads. So there are many people out there on Twitter, who will post information about things that they need. So they might tweet, like, Hey, I’m really looking for a great marketing company to help me with social media or they might tweet, you know, perhaps they are an agency themselves and they need someone to help bridge the gap on social media. I’ve made some partnerships that way.
So you know, I partner with other marketing agencies that perhaps are really good at strategic planning, or they’re really great at advertising, but they’re not so great at social media. And so they’ll often tweet, like, hey, looking for someone to help me with this social project, and I’m able to kind of like dive in and get those great leads. And also, it is a great way for you to participate in relevant trending topics. And that may not seem as important to you right now. But as we go along, you will see how capitalizing on those trending topics can move your brand from unknown to known very quickly.
So here are just a couple of little Twitter stats I thought would be nice for everyone to take away.
Twitter Statistics/ Scheduling
Currently, there are 353.1 million monthly users. So I’m pretty sure that’s not the size of a dime social media platform. So you know, just keep that in mind. There are 2.1 billion search queries. And so the search queries are they’re just things that people go to Twitter to search for, like, you know, like a might search for makeup brands or, you know, automotive tips. And so those are that’s what they’re saying is that Twitter is also being used as a search engine in some ways.
The way that we use YouTube, you know, we use other social media sources for search engines. There are 6000 tweets sent each second. 500 million tweets per day. 200 billion per year. And the median tweet reaches 75% of his potential engagement in less than three hours. I will also tell you that unlike other social media platforms like Facebook, (and Facebook is a whole nother class) but unlike social media, platforms like Facebook.
Twitter does not limit the view of individuals who can see from your business account. So you know, Facebook, which like I said, again, it’s a whole nother thing. They do limit the amount of individuals who could see posts on your account. If you’re not buying active ads.
Twitter does not do that. So a lot of people will go to Twitter to get fast, quick information out knowing everybody who follows them has the opportunity to see it. It’s also important to post on Twitter multiple times a day. So this is usually where I lose the audience. because Twitter is not that post once a day and leave it type of platform.
At the very least if you have to post once a day, that’s fine, but you really should be posting on Twitter, anywhere between like five and seven times a day. So hope I didn’t lose anybody right there. But that’s the suggested amount of postings.
Setting Up A Twitter Business Profile
All right, so setting up a profile on Twitter. So I have a couple of examples and, you know, we’ll then go to real Twitter so I can show you how to make those types of changes.
About Yourself Or Your Business
But I have a couple of examples of the way profiles are set up on Twitter. So this is we don’t know what’s but Chipotle uses an approach of a very simple bio, you know, they’re like their intro is very simple. It’s just eat, tweeting, repeating. So you can kind of take that approach if you have a let’s say you’re an author, and you just simply want to tell people like the key points about you you can say, Best Selling Author, Life Coach, Mommy, you know, you can just use those simple words.
Personal Or Business Url
Of course, everyone wants to put their URL here because you want people to go to your website. And I guess if you don’t have a website, you’ll probably need to see either me or Matt for that. And then you also, you know what, you know, create like a very visually appealing cover to go along with your look.
Tagline
Now, this Chipotle one I didn’t screenshot a cover but I believe some of the next ones have it. Target takes a different approach. So target. What I liked about them is that they’re actually showing a page that has multiple pages. So this is the main target page see at Target. They describe themselves, as okay, expect more, pay less — as their tagline sharing target feelings. That’s what this page is for. So this page, they’re telling you we’re going to use this page to share information about Target, but they’re also telling you for guest service questions go to ask target, that’s another page they’ve set up completely designated to their customer support and that’s where people can go, and actually make you know, you know, to have questions and make comments about products or services or whatever they need to do.
So that’s a really great example and you can actually just use Twitter for your customer service. You could have just a, you know, ask KatBro page. And so then, when they’re on my other social pages, they know, oh, hey, if I have a question that I want, KatBro to answer about their services or, you know, the experience that I had, I can go to ask KatBro on Twitter.
This page here is for an author. So this is like an individual who is an author and they want to maybe give more information about themselves. So I want you to take a look at how they describe themselves. They’ve put short words you know, keywords for them like that’s basically what you want to do is like have these keywords so they Auntie, that’s cute, you know, my favorite Auntie. Latte lover. On a mission to eliminate the gender wage gap. Okay, so now we know what her hashtag is because she will probably in her pet page have multiple posts where she’s posting hashtag gender wage cap, or here, you know, hashtag negotiate. She’s telling you what her hashtags are. See also telling you who she is. And she’s pointing you to her company pages.
So, as a CEO, you can have your own page, like an activity page. And then I can say, Founder of Katbro. That way, you know, I can categorize the content that’s coming into me. So I don’t know, hey, if someone’s on my CEO page, they’re interested in me as a person. If someone’s on my Katbro page, this is business-related information. So just keep in mind that you don’t have to just have one type of account.
This individual was also an author and what I really wanted to kind of hone in on him is that on his particular page, he not only highlights who he is as a person but also gives us a link where we can kind of find out more about him. So you want to make sure like, if you’re going to use Twitter to promote not just your business but yourself that you’re providing the links inside of the bio, as well as the links to your website. So let’s actually head over to Twitter. And we can look at how to make those changes. And like I said, we’re gonna spend a ton of time in this area because I’m sure most of you know how to do you know most of this so on this page.
This is my page, my personal page. So whenever it’s Katie, my pages are always called at KatBro Live. So this is when people know they’re talking directly to Katie. My business pages are usually at Katbrol Ltd. And we have pages on Instagram and Facebook for that but Twitter is kind of reserved for just me communicating about what’s going on with me personally. And also I answer customer inquiries and tell them about things that you know are happening inside the business, not necessarily products. I don’t use my Twitter account for promotions. You certainly can. I just have you know, I don’t choose to do that. So I just use the very short and sweet you know, tagline here, marketing with real results.
Hashtags
There’s a link to my profile here. It tells people, of course, the day that I joined Twitter, and then also, you know if they can, you know, see any kind of relevant hashtags that I’m using.
This is basically like the hashtags that I use like you know, hashtag #marketingagency, #wewonanaward. So of course, we use hashtag award-winning in that one. And we put, you know, there’s a couple members of my team there, and we put, you know, as much information about ourselves and just that little post. Now going into….. who grabbed this document? So going into the edit your profile page, where you would put all of that wonderful information is right here in the bio. So you will come up with whatever those words are that you want to say you know, perhaps you have like an automotive company and you want to say, you know, fixing fast cars for a great price, so you know, something like that.
You can also put in here the key hashtags that you plan to use on the page. So it’s like hashtag CEO life and then you’ll see that the hashtags that I apply are hyperlinked. Automatically. So if I’m going to use those on my page, when people hit hashtag #KatBro, they could just pull up relevant things that I posted.
Twitter Cover
Okay. Also, if you go into the Edit, Profile screen, you will see that you’ll also be able to apply a cover. I did apply for a cover related to the company because we were doing a summer website sale.
Profile Picture
And then you know, you can put your profile picture here which you can use your company logo or you can use your personal face it depends on how you use the page. If you go down a little bit more, you’ll be able to tell people the location you’re at. This is where you fill in the website and of course, self-explanatory, this is where you would add your date of birth if you want people to know that I actually add the date of the company so I don’t use my personal date of birth. You know, because it’s a 40 something. I don’t want to age myself that much.
Okay, so I think we’re all pretty familiar with how to set up a basic Twitter bio. We understand the different styles that we can do those in. I think we also understand that we can use different Twitter accounts for different options. So let’s dive into the next step of our training here. Actually, I don’t want to miss this one.
Twitter Page Overview
So this is one of my favorite Twitter accounts is Wendy’s. If you have never gone to Wendy’s Twitter page, please do that. You will laugh, laugh, laugh. It is an absolute joy. They are so funny. And they even tell you in their bio that they’re going to be funny on this page. So it says we like our tweets the same way we like to make hamburgers better than anyone expects from a fast-food joint.
So I think that you know, I always just love when I see that on a social media page where someone is telling you what you could expect out of a page.
And it’s generally the way I teach clients to do their social media. If you’re going to use Facebook for training and education, let the visitors know, hey on my Facebook page, you’re going to find training resources, downloadable documents blase, blase. And Twitter is going to be used for customer service purposes. Then it’s wonderful to say like, Hey, ask me any question you want. This is the right social media source. And when you kind of give your social media different jobs like that, they work a lot better for you. It’s not enough to just post the random content across all the platforms, you really want the platforms to have their own job. Okay.
So I want you to take a just we’ll take maybe a minute and a half, I’ll check the clock or the two minutes because I’m going to write a bio in three different ways. You have 160 words to work within your bio, and that’s all the bio is going to give you anyway. So explain what you do. Do a social proof bio, which is the BIOS I was showing you that actually have like your hashtags and those kinds of things in there.
Your personal bio, is that little bit more like that author and the keyword-specific bio. So those would be the BIOS where I’m sorry, I’m flip-flopping. So social proof bio would be the bio where maybe you had a second bio that was designated for customer service or something else. So you know if I had one that said like Katie, you know, marketing with real results for questions as at Katie as Katie or something like that. And then the keywords specific ones are the one kind of like what I just showed you that actually have your keywords that you plan to use in your hashtags.
Bio Activity
So just take a moment to go through them. If you have any questions on what each one of those kinds of bios mean, let me know. But you have two minutes to write a bio in three different ways. pine tree down and I’m just currently flashing on the screen the different biotypes. So for little inspiration if that helps anybody out. Then we’re gonna go. Okay. Let’s go ahead and continue.
Is there anyone that had any questions about that section before I move on? I don’t want anyone lost in any time. Remember, if you have questions, you can use the little like hand icon to ask questions. There’s also a Q/&A panel. Let me reduce those. All of these little things always get in my way when I’m online spraying my planet. There are so many things.
Why Schedule Content
So the next kind of chapter in this training is why schedule content. So Content Scheduling is something that I like to do. I like to do it because there are some times when I’m just far too busy to stop and make a tweet. But I know that the tweets are necessary. I know that the postings on Facebook and Instagram are necessary, but I’m too busy and you know, my life is just kind of crazy. It also gives me a chance to be able to interact more as a social media manager than to worry about what posts went out. So it serves a lot of purposes. And I’ve listed a couple of them here.
Saves You Time And Money
So one, it saves you time and money. Now, it saves you money because you don’t have to stop what you’re doing which is your money making activity to make a post, and obviously saves you money because if you are able to hire an agency who will do a certain amount of scheduled postings for you, as well as a certain amount of live postings, then you don’t have to necessarily hire an individual person whose complete job is to just post on social media all day. And that’s, you know, that can be very costly to hire a staff member like that. So that’s why sometimes you’re able to just hire an agency that can do those types of things for you.
It Allows Social Media Managers To Engage With Fans
It allows social media managers to engage with fans, and this is really the primary reason why I use scheduled postings because if I’m busy talking to a customer, or potential customer, or just someone who happens to be a KT fan, then I you know, I don’t also want to have to worry about when what time the next post goes out. You know, if I’m communicating back and forth, I don’t want to stop and say oh, sorry, it’s two o’clock. I got to post my next post. You know, the post is already happening.
It does force you to think about the content in advance so that you’re making wise decisions about your content. You’re also making sure that you’re spelling things correctly. That is a terrible thing that happens all the time to businesses where they are not kind of thinking about what they’re posting and they’re posting things with the wrong spellings or the wrong use of the word there, their, they’re. It’s you know, it just it diminishes the brand you know when people are like, hey, I’d really like to, you know, buy this service from me but you can’t really spell. You know you want to be mindful of what you’re doing.
Forces You To Think About Content In Advance Such As Important Dates, National Holidays, Or Awareness Initiatives Related To Your Business.
It also helps you not to forget things. So if you’re scheduling certain types of posts out like holidays, you don’t have to wake up on Christmas morning and say, oh my goodness, I forgot to post for Christmas. The Christmas post is already done. So there should be a healthy balance between the postings that you’re scheduling and also the postings that you’re doing why. It allows you to also have awareness for certain initiatives that are related to your business.
I don’t know if, many of you know but this month is actually a Black business month. So because this month is like black business and Black Enterprise month. Many African American-owned businesses actually having scheduled content to go out each month that talks about other African American individuals who are in business. So you know, it might talk about the history of, you know, a famous, you know, an entrepreneur like that, you know, just so that they’re just so that they know, hey, we’re up to date with what is going on, on Women in Business Month is coming up. You know, there are so many things going on. If you have a social service type industry, you know that October is Domestic Violence month, you want to make sure that you stay abreast of those things that are happening in the world, and that and those are where your scheduled postings can come in.
Helps You Make Sure That You’re Addressing All Of Your Platforms
It also helps you make sure that you’re addressing all of your platforms. So if you’re like me, like I have one that’s kind of like a favorite for me. Twitter is one of my favorites. And you should be my absolute favorite, but I’ve kind of like moved over to Instagram, and I’ve become a kind of Instagram junkie. So I spend lots of time on Instagram. And then I forget oh shoot, I just post on Twitter. So scheduling posts allows me to stay active on all my platforms, just in case I happen to forget to post on one of them.
Pop Quiz
So here’s a little pop quiz. What is the average lifespan of a tweet? And I would like you guys to put them in the chat but I don’t know if this functionality has been checked. So just write it down somewhere on a piece of paper. And, and you’ll know if you’re right. You just have to like be proud of yourself silent.
So the average lifespan of a tweet is 18 minutes. That means if you are tweeting something you basically have 18 minutes before it falls to the bottom of the Twitter page. Because Twitter feeds are extremely fast and 18 minutes is actually generous because it used to be a little shorter than that. But Twitter is very fast and when people are looking at their Twitter feeds, it’s not so much like Facebook where you can see something that somebody posted at eight o’clock in the morning. Now when you go on Twitter, everything that people are posting happened within the past half hour to an hour. I mean, and before you know it, you can’t even go back and find your own posts unless you go back to your own page. So I say that to emphasize the importance of multiple postings throughout the day on Twitter. And also being able to engage people because on Twitter you will get feedback very quickly. So you do want to make sure that you’re staying on top of it because you have about 15 minutes really to respond to a person before they’re just no longer interested and talking about it anymore.
Posting Rules To Consider
So here are a couple of general rules to consider when choosing to use Twitter.
Location Matters
One your location matters if you’re trying to reach a global audience. Creating a Twitter handle for each region is a great idea. And you want to use social media management tools that help you run all of those platforms. So be sure to create social media reports. And it’s actually quite easy to do this because you can create social media calendar so that you know what types of things are going on those various pages, much like Cultivate has various locations. So Cultivate can have a local Twitter account for each and every location, because the things you’re going to post on those pages are going to be relevant to what’s going on at that particular location.
So, what Matt would have to do is create a social media calendar of hey, here’s what’s gonna go on in London. Here’s what’s gonna go on in Grove City. Here’s what’s gonna go on in Columbus. You know, those kinds of various pages, you know, what is happening in that particular area that he’s targeting. And Twitter does give you access to analytics. So and I can always show you that you know, during this training, that you will have access to analytics so you’ll be able to pull up what is performing best in which area. So you want to make sure that you know what gets the most traction. It could be that a Columbus audience is more appealed. To perhaps like current events that are happening in the city, whereas perhaps like the London audience, might be more into the training and the workshops. So you just want to you know, see, hey, this is what my audience likes on this page.
Right Tools
You also want to use the right tool. There are many many tools out there that you can use to help you auto-schedule things such as HootSuite scheduler and Buffer.
I used to use Hootsuite for years so I have great things to say about it if you got the platform that you choose. We now have a proprietary system that was built for us that we have our clients use, but HootSuite if that’s something that you want to use. Hootsuite is a great resource. It’s absolutely free for the first three platforms. I think you can put like, three of them on there. And then you know after that, it’s like maybe $14 a month so something to look into. I don’t know too much about CO scheduler but I did use Buffer for years for Instagram. So it’s a really great Instagram tool and Buffer and HootSuite both also have built-in calendars so you can actually map out in both of those platforms, what you’re gonna post each day, and then you go back in and put the time that you want to post it. So it’s, I mean, they’re awesome tools. And if you want to put analytics across all your platforms, they’re great tools for that too.
Know Your Audience
You also want to know your audience. So you want to know how old are they? Where do they live? What do they like to do for work? What is their community? Like? What do they do in their free time? You want to answer these questions even prior to choosing the social platform that you’re gonna make your primary social platform but you also want to know these prior to setting up your Twitter account because you want to set your Twitter account to target that particular market. But if we were doing kind of a social media overall class, I would tell you, you really shouldn’t know that even before you decide which social platforms are right for you. Because you don’t need to be on all of them. I mean, you really don’t. You want to choose the ones that are going to match the audience that you’re trying to reach at the time.
What’s Real-time Marketing
All right, this is just my little quote. Okay, so what’s real-time marketing? Real-time marketing is basically live tweets. So it’s if I’m out on the corner of broadening, hi, it’s me taking my phone, taking a picture of the broad and high sign, and tweeting in the center of the city and posting it out to the world. It’s real-time— what I’m doing right now. So the benefit of real-time marketing is it’s organic. And it’s real like it’s I’m trying to use a really great word for it. Like, obviously, it’s real, but it’s, it’s it kind of it leaves people like with that insider type of view. So they’re thinking, wow, I’m following the company around.
I’m a CEO or I’m getting a kind of voyeur-type view into their life. And that is very appealing to individuals on social media. You can’t imagine how many times I’m surprised at the plates of like the plates of food that are liked and shared on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. I’m just like people just because not everyone, ie. Everybody needs to look at everyone else’s plate. But it is kind of like a kind of voyeurs. It’s kind of more of it but we have become like these people that just sit around and think like, you know, what’s it like to be inside their office? What’s it like to be that?
And so real-time marketing, and I know your audience to see what’s it like to be like, what’s it like to follow around Kat or the CEO of KatBro, or the CEO of Cultivate or whatever agency that you and that’s what brings in the audience, so you might as well do it. So here’s something that I want to show you about. Kind of like that. Real-time marketing. So I know you guys remember this whole dress debacle that happened about?
I don’t know, maybe it’s four years now. And so people were seeing either gold and white, or they were seeing blue and black. Now I’m gonna be honest with you. I completely don’t understand those who saw blue and black. But I’m not saying you didn’t, I just don’t understand it. However, that was a golden opportunity to do some real-time marketing and Dunkin Donuts saw that opportunity. So they said it doesn’t matter if it’s blue, black, white, or gold use, they still taste delicious. And they combine that with their product. So you know, even if even for me, like we do logos and those kinds of things. You know, I could put a logo up in blue and black and white and gold and white and I could have said like, doesn’t matter if you want your logo and blue or black or gold and white, they’re still gonna come out fabulous because KatBro designs them, you know, I get, you know, kind of play off of what’s happening in the world. And that’s what’s so relevant about real-time is not only, you know, not only just for that whole insider look that I just spoke to you about but also to show that you’re a brand that keeps up with relevant content that’s happening every day around the globe.
Pharell Williams & Arby’s Case Study
So here’s another one. I’m like, this is the whole Pharrell Williams Arby’s hat thing that he wore to the Grammys. So Arby’s tweeted, hey, for round, can we have our hat back hashtag #Grammys, which I thought was hilarious at the time, and this hilarious tweet in some major results. So from that one, they received 1440 Plus placements and 120 point 8 million daily impressions in the category of pop tarts are open like National Consumer entertainment. I mean, they were everywhere. The Wall Street Wall Street Journal recognize Arby’s tweet to Pharrell as the second-best pop culture moment in 2014.
Also, there was a huge business impact to them, when their percentages went way up in sales, because all of a sudden, they were just front of mind. So if I’m driving down the street, and I’m like, oh, there’s Arby’s, and I turn to my friend like you remember when they posted that funny thing about Rome? Let’s go check out the roast beef. So you know, you’d never know what to put you in front of mind for people. And then also like on a Nash, traditional media results, national media marketing experts, and online influencers also took notice of Arby’s engagement around Pharrell Williams hat, calling it one of the top marketing moments of 2014.
So just that tiny little tweet of 140 characters just gave them huge results based on them staying relevant, or staying up to date with what was relevant at the time. Now I know we have a lot of media going on and not all of it is maybe tweeted worthy for you guys, but you know, you got to find the small funny moments and age and find the enjoyable moments. People remember when you bring in laughter, they remember when you make them feel something any emotion you know, laughter, pain, sadness, joy, you know, you have to make people feel.
So if you find something that you can connect your brand with, that people are already emotionally engaged with. Even like the Grammys, people are emotionally engaged with the Grammys, they’re it’s a source of entertainment. Maybe they’re excited for their fifth, their favorite singer to win and they just capitalize on that emotion that was already happening. So this is just you know, it’s another peek into how you can engage using Twitter. Again, so there’s another case study. I’m gonna run overrun by you guys and this is one a little bit older, and I’m not sure everybody remembers it. But this was when they had the blackout during the Super Bowl. And Oreos are really, really, really hot. Their team just went to work on this one. So they just made a simple post that said power out no problem. And they’re little hast or little comment here is you can still dunk in the dark.
Oreo During The 2013 Superbowl
Okay, so I wanted to show that part about how many minutes it took. Because here’s the thing. Oreo already knew in advance that they were going to be an advertiser at the Superbowl. So they have their entire marketing team and I know you guys don’t have entire marketing teams just yet. But if you know that you’re a part of something or if you know something’s happening, you still can have that spur of the moment kind of activity. But Oreo had their entire marketing team just kind of sitting there waiting like hey, we want to see our ad so that they could probably tweet something amazing about their ad. All of a sudden, the entire Superbowl goes black, and their team has to think fast. Like how are we going to capitalize on this moment and then they came up with a slogan, a graphic, and a post in 10 minutes. So that’s kind of how on top of things, you know how fast things work on Twitter.
Oreo Campaign Results
So that moment made them major results. So that particular post was retweeted 15,000 times within the first night, Twitter following their Twitter following increased by 8000 followers, their Facebook posts received 20,000 likes Instagram followers increased from 2000 to 36,000. Was 2000 is kind of low for Oreo bateau. Or, and then also, the phenomenon was a part of a daily twist campaign that continued from there. And so they were able to actually take it even further and make it into a different campaign that they use, you know, after that. So here are some types of real-time marketing that you can kind of be a part of. So there’s the planned marketing which is much like the Oreo, so you know, a lot of information about the event prior to it happening. And then you can schedule some content beforehand, like the Oscars or the Grammys, and then there’s opportunistic marketing, which I’m sorry that one is more like the Oreo.
The first one is more like the Pharrell Williams. The opportunistic-marketing is you know when events going to happen, but something unexpected also happens, like the Oreo incident, and you take advantage of the unexpected. Then there’s the watch list, which is you know, something will happen but it hasn’t happened yet. It may result in one of two options so the I put an example the royal baby birth and that was for the birth of William, not William I’m sorry Harry and Megan Markel shot like, you know, it’s happening but you maybe don’t know because a boy or girl so you kind of wait for the results so that you can take advantage of you know, that opportunity, and then your every day, which is you don’t really know what will happen. Sometimes things pop up unexpectedly, like the dress debacle, and then you just say up let me make a post about it because I heard this on the news this morning. I would encourage you to only equate your brand with the more lighthearted things you hear in the news. But you know, I heard this on the news this morning. Let me go ahead and play on that on my Twitter account.
Activity
So here’s an activity for just a few minutes and I’m probably just going to narrow it down to probably like two to three minutes. You’ll be shown why I should say in the next few minutes you’ll be shown two different scenarios of events and I’m going to give you about two to three minutes to make your responses to that.
So after the last scenario, you have approximately three minutes to determine how your brand can be a part of the conversation of the two scenarios that I’m about to show you. All tweets must include a hashtag and a photo, now because we have limited time and we’re in a webinar-type setting. I’m not gonna hold you to the photo, but I will hold you to the hashtags. I think you can come up with some pretty cool hashtags. Alright, so here is the first scenario. And I actually have this queued up already. Get this out of my face If they give you about three minutes to come up with two tweets, you can relate your brand to those two scenarios in either a light-hearted, or serious way, but it has to be a way that matches your brand. So it can’t just be, hey, did you see what happened? So it would have to be something that matched your brand so I’m gonna give you guys a stop moment, and then we’ll move on because I want to make sure that I respect your time and that we, you know, continue to know one on one but the one that helps anyone, I’ll share the one that I came up with. So I came up with you know, so we do a lot of like print work, so we do a lot of like, design work for printing, and everything. So I came up with one about Vistaprint so it was like, hey Vistaprint your business card looked amazing, but KatBro had one of the best business card designs of all time.
So obviously I’m not gonna like a shoutout Mr. Prince, but that was one that we came up with within the office and that was pretty so just so you guys can have your morning when you guys came on, I just know that it’s like, We’re nearing 1030. So I want to keep the ones that you guys keep on with that. You’ll just be hearing me in the background.
Why Real Marketing Is Important
So, sometimes the biggest social opportunities are those that we don’t plan for 60% of marketers know that they struggle with personalized content in real-time. Yep. 77% believe that real-time personalization is critical. Consumers are 22% more likely to consider a brand as a result of real-time marketing, because of course, they’re already paying attention to the incident anyway, so if they see your brand popped up, pop up there, grabs definitely gonna take advantage of that. One of the more recent examples I can see is like the Bernie Sanders mittens being you know like everybody was on that big brand small brands everyone was on that and then they all got big results. Real-time marketing can also be used to promote events, form customer relationships, increase engagement and identify brand advocates online.
Social Management Tools
Social media management tools, posting in real-time all the time is not cost-effective and can waste organizations’ time and money. Which is why we spoke earlier about you having a strategy for that scheduled content. Using social media management tools allow social media managers to focus more on engagement. Social media management tools can range from free to hundreds of dollars a month on-site.
The on the site or free, which is why I gave you the example of HootSuite which will allow you to have up to three social platforms on it for free we talked about the most common ones are ready. Social media management platforms also include analytics report tools, as I explained earlier, and so they’re a really great resource for you to be able to see analytics across all of your platforms. So since we’re nearing the end, I definitely didn’t want to look over the customer service piece. We just went through two other pieces we went through understanding how to put together the bio and making your page stand out a bit more with a well-crafted bio as well as cover picture and in the profile icon sorry. And then we moved into real-time versus scheduled postings and how you can leverage both of those for your brand.
Customer Service 101
And now we’re moving into the customer service and brand management piece. It is very critical to in one of the primary tools for using Twitter. So if you’re a part of an organization that does not have a designated Social Media Manager, it’s important to delegate the task to someone with the most marketing experience. And sometimes in small business. It’s you you know, for a while it may all of this may be although everyone is not always a social media manager it is essential for there to be a basic skill level of understanding, which is why you’re here today.
I’m saying this to also let you know that even if you are a team of me, and there’s only just that one person, you still should begin to write social media etiquette and social media procedures. As far as like an employee handbook for if you have that time where you’re able to bring someone else on the team. They understand how to engage your brand in social media, especially when it comes to Twitter. There should be an employee handbook on conduct online as well as social media guidelines. For those who are managing this specific account.
Domino Effect
Social media can sometimes be the first and the last impression for customers. Be very considerate of who you let manage your social media. Letting the right person manages social media can result in sales and great customer engagement, letting the wrong person manage your social media, especially if there are no preset guidelines can result in stream embarrassment and reputation damage. So we have the domino effect. And this is a video that I really want you to pay attention to. It was made by a private employee, but it affected Domino’s entire brand.
I do so many videos I saw an example of a young man sneezing on someone’s breadsticks. And then randomly, you know, kind of putting them in the mix of the other breadsticks. So some unsuspecting customer in the video says it’s fun to get snot on their breadsticks. Now, clearly, you can see that this irresponsibly made a video and it’s made by just two people clowning around at work, and they may have not even ever put the breadsticks in the mix, but for Domino’s brand, this was detrimental to their brand. Because these people were on Facebook. Their locations were tagged, Domino’s brand was tagged and people were afraid then like genuinely afraid to order something from Domino’s locations. They came they had other employees like this. And so this is a major crisis for Domino’s. They need to figure out how are we going to fix this? Obviously, those two people were fired. So we didn’t see the rest of the video where the commentator talks about the, you know, Domino’s firing the people but they were absolutely fine.
However, Domino’s has damage control to do online. And so Twitter was the place they chose to do their reputation, brand management and they waited they made a good a good move in doing that because Twitter is the way you get information out very fast and you kind of get in front of things like that. So what are some examples of what you’ve seen a social media crisis from public figures or businesses? Just think about it in your own head. Like, you know, tell us how have you seen them bounce back?
Customer Service Emergency Plan
You know, first, they have to issue an apology. Right? They have to take responsibility for what’s happening correctly. And then they need to put procedures and policies in place. To make sure that that never happens again. So if you were Domino’s manager, how are the CEO I’m sorry, how would you have handled this situation? What would you have done in a situation like this? So let’s see what he did do to make it right.
So as you can see from his response, here are the key takeaways is one, he took complete responsibility for the actions. Explain how the individuals were being handled in terms of, you know, what they what repercussions they suffered, they were fired. There were criminal charges being brought against that. He also went as far as to say, listen, that particular incident is isolated. We’ve not had incidents like that. In the past, however, to ensure we never have an incident like that in the future. We have our facilities sanitized, and we have new cleaning procedures. And so that’s really what it takes. If you find that your brand is in trouble.
And I do apologize earlier. I thought it was Facebook Live but it was YouTube, my apologies. But um, you know, you take to social media, you go to social media, Twitter is the best place to go and get those real-time tweets going. So people see it especially the media because that’s what you know if you have a brand and reputation issue, you want to take it to the media, and the media to pick it up so that they can help you and fixing the issue. You take to social media and you offer your statements and the formula is really just that apologize for the correct move forward. I mean, that’s the formula that I mean, in any like brand reputation management course you that you’ve ever taken. I do encourage you guys to take one at some point.
That’s going to be your formula there. So an estimate of 41 billion is lost by US companies. Alone each year due to poor customer service. 67% of consumers have used a company’s social media channel for customer service, which is why I also mentioned using Twitter to answer customer questions and concerns 42% of customers expect a response within 60 minutes. 57% of customers expect that same response time at night. It doesn’t matter. They don’t care if it’s the weekend or night they’re not waiting for Monday morning. You will commit to social media you are committing to being available for your customer’s responses 24 hours a day, which is often when people end up hiring an agency or something to do it.
Nielsen ratings have found that 33% of customers prefer to contact brands using social media rather than the phone that is 100% true because even I do that 1/3 of consumers admit they would retaliate against the brand online post a review or complaint via social media. Customers who encounter positive social customer experience are three times more likely to recommend a brand on social media.
So when it comes to a problem where you or your company is in the wrong it’s important, again to do a quick apology, which we kind of went through this procedure. Don’t take it personally apologize and then take whatever was the offensive video or post. Take it offline immediately. You also want to maybe cancel any events or any other scheduled postings for a few days. You want to just kind of let things cool down. After you offer your apology post just let everything cool down for a few days. Don’t post anything else you know in addition therein so that’s what, this is the customer service emergency plan pause scheduling, social media posts, pop-ups pause paid ads on social media channels. Because definitely you don’t want to have like running ads and you have a negative press. Pause any marketing emails, and assess planning, blogging, and campaign schedule for appropriateness. Skip create blog entries addressing the situation that’s needed and then provide talking points for executives as needed.
You want to also check all content for relevant references that may be offensive or rude. And this is and this is like if you are pre-scheduling things, you have more control over like what goes out, then maybe live tweets. So that’s why you want to make sure that you’re telling the people on your team, Hey, these are the things that are acceptable and these are things that are not a lot of things that can happen on accident. I mean, people don’t, they don’t need to be offensive but they may say something on accident that does offend another and you do have to take responsibility for that.
This really could happen to anybody. So you really want to make sure that when you’re tweeting things, you’re very socially conscious of what’s going on. Before you jump into a hashtag and make sure you know the context, especially if you’re a brand.
(Transcription from the video included in the presentation)
“Hey, I’m Julian on bus 60 DiGiorno Pizza is facing the wrath of the internet after tweeting the hashtag #whyIstayedyou had pizza. It wouldn’t be harmless if why I stayed wasn’t about domestic violence after the release of that horrifying video showing Ray Rice knocking out his then-fiancee now wife Janae some are wondering why she would continue to be in a relationship with him. Domestic violence is a serious and at times complicated issue. So people took to Twitter and showed solidarity using the hashtag #whyIstayedyou the reasons range from physical threats to feeling too embarrassed to ask for help. Unfortunately, DiGiorno didn’t do research before tweeting since there’s so much pressure for brands to be vocal on social media. Now they are usually very funny and engaging Twitter feed is filled with apologies. Georgia was pretty good at Twitter. So they’re handling this epic failure the best way possible. Acknowledging it accepting blame and sending out heartfelt personal tweets as opposed to auto replying and when it comes down to it a careless tweet followed by an instant apology is still better than this. I think the messages take the stairs.”
In these two bits, I realize I skipped that slide earlier. But that incident I think could really happen to anybody. You could jump on the back of any hashtag that you aren’t sure of what’s happening behind it. So before you do that, do a little hashtag research and figure out what’s going on before you jump into you know, a Twitter bandwagon and end up on the wrong side. So during this course today, we learned how to set up our profiles, our bios, and our profiles to make them more appealing. We learned how to do you know the comparison between real-time posting versus scheduled posting and how to use current events to monetize our brand. We also looked at how to provide customer service and brand reputation management using Twitter. So are there any questions because this Twitter course is very light, it’s a robust class that I had to condense into like, an hour If there are any questions I completely understand.