(MKTG 347) Week 6 - Twitter

Chapter Five of CASA Marketing Intro to Social Media Marketing by Todd Kelsey discusses the use of Twitter as a social media marketing tool. According to Kelsey Twitter is a social media channel that will stay around for awhile and one that businesses will always use for posts. Twitter is similar to Facebook in the aspect that not many people make purchases from the social media sites. Obviously there are exceptions to this statement but in general it seems that peoples intent to purchase is much lower on social media sites.

Twitter is often used by the younger demographic to complain about a product or reach the company to issue a complaint about a product. With this being said, a business needs to learn how to interact with their customers via Twitter. There is an expectation that if a consumer has an issue and they tweet the company about it that the company will reply in a timely manner.

There are a few basic concepts that you need to understand about Twitter before you start using it. When you tweet something you are only limited to 140 characters so what you say needs to be short concise and to the point. Also, you want to make sure that your name on Twitter reflects your company if you do not use your companies name. This is because when someone tweets to your company they have to @ the company name. So if I was looking for a company called Top Tail  I would start by searching for this @: @TopTail. Another concept to keep in mind is that Twitter uses hashtags (#) to associate the post with a topic. If I were talking about a dog leash from Top Tail and i wanted to say that dogs rules I could easily create a tweet as follows: This @TopTail dog leash is the perfect leash for my pooch and I! #dogsrule . This post is something a customer could tweet about your product and than anyone else searching the hashtag dogs rule will see this post.

Twitter does offer different forms of advertising such as promoted tweets and leveraging advertisements. However, it is important to keep in mind whether or not the money you are spending on advertising is benefiting your business. Maybe there is a different strategy you should be using with Twitter. Maybe you should be monitoring your account more or maybe you should start focusing on another social media channel. You always need to remember to look at your ROI. Always, always, always!

Hashtags can be used strategically to help increase engagement amongst your audience. However, you need to be careful that you do not over use or annoy your followers with your hashtags.