What is it that makes Twitter an effective marketing tool?

Connor Ryan DMA -­‐ 2813712

Research Paper

What is it that makes Twitter an effective marketing tool?

Research paper submitted as a requirement for the degree of BA Digital Media Arts, London South Bank University, May 2013.

Word Count: 6797

Abstract

The aim of this research paper is to look at Twitter as a marketing tool and decide the reasons as to why is it effective. In order to do this I will draw upon a range of professional opinions from the marketing, branding and social media industries and then with further research into the platform of Twitter and its establishment within the online media world, draw conclusions as to its effectiveness.

This paper has shown that Twitter has proven benefits to a range of businesses looking to expand their marketing campaigns. These benefits come not only in a monetary form, for example by the relative cost-­‐free marketing options or increase in sales figures, but also due to the ability to connect to a large audience, worldwide and have the ability to advertise to this audience. A further benefit being the ability to actively network with your customers, engaging them in conversation with your brand.

The research has shown that it is a range of contributing factors that make Twitter an effective marketing tool for a large majority, but not all businesses.

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Table of Contents Abstract..................................................................................................................2 Introduction ...........................................................................................................4 Twitter ...................................................................................................................6 History Of Twitter.............................................................................................................................................. 6 Developments...................................................................................................................................................... 7 How It Works ....................................................................................................................................................... 8 Tools for Businesses ...................................................................................................................................... 10 Limitations ......................................................................................................................................................... 11 Alternatives ....................................................................................................................................................... 12 Marketing.............................................................................................................13 Where to Start .................................................................................................................................................. 13 The Market......................................................................................................................................................... 15 Your Brand......................................................................................................................................................... 16 Current Strategy, Will it Work?................................................................................................................. 18 Peer to Peer ....................................................................................................................................................... 20 Effectiveness ........................................................................................................21 Positives .............................................................................................................................................................. 21 Negative............................................................................................................................................................... 22 Conclusion ............................................................................................................23

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Introduction

What is it that makes Twitter an effective marketing tool?

The purpose of this research is to look at the use of Twitter as a marketing tool and to draw conclusions as to why 57% of all businesses that use social media for marketing use Twitter. (Bennett, 2012)

Twitter is a social media website which allows you to build an online community or network of followers that you can send small blog postings, updates, links and messages to. With a limit of 140 characters per post or “Tweet” as they are known, this allows for the presentation of more concise and clear facts and figures in comparison to other blogging methods that have no size limitations.

The average Twitter user has 27 followers and approximately 750 tweets are sent every second on Twitter. (Bennett, 2012) With this amount of communication and networking on Twitter the ability for eWom (electronic-­‐ word-­‐of-­‐mouth) marketing is immense. This is further supported by the ease of creating and posting a tweet as well as the ability to re-­‐tweet what has already been posted. This peer-­‐to-­‐peer marketing however is something that must be considered extremely carefully by businesses using Twitter, as there is no taking back comments once they have been released into the world of social media.

Twitter has a range of tools it provides for business only users, such as the ability to promote tweets, trends and profile pages. As well as offering analytical tools enabling businesses to see how many people are viewing, sharing and engaging with their Tweets. This is something traditional analogue media had no way of doing without surveys.

The ease of which any business can establish itself on Twitter is also something to be looked at as any business can set up an account and have real time communication with its customers.

Twitter is such a unique service, offering the ability to become extremely intimate in a users life, by this I mean the fact that have it on their computers in their homes but also on their smart phones in their pockets. With this power businesses must be extremely careful about the way in which they engage via Twitter and how that represents them as a brand. It can be extremely damaging to a brand if the power of social media is abused.

In order to effectively complete my research I will be summarising points made in a variety of scholarly papers and published books such as Eileen Brown’s Working the Crowd (2011). Eileen Brown is the CEO of Amastra Ltd, a company specialising in online and offline social marketing methods. As well as David Meerman Scott’s The New Rules of Marketing and PR (2011). David is an American online marketing strategist.

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I will also look at branding as this plays a major part in gaining the trust of people enough to allow them to follow your business on Twitter and thus let you into there homes through the medium of Twitter. Allowing your brand to be represented online is something that must be monitored extremely carefully. All employees who are given access to the social media advertising must be “Singing from the same hymn sheet” in order to maintain that the companies branded message is maintained. This is something I will go on to look at in more depth.

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Twitter History Of Twitter

Work on Twitter first began in 2006 by Jack Doresey (former CEO, @jack) and Noah Glass (@noah).(Malik, 2009) It began life known as “Twttr” a service allowing you to broadcast SMS (Short Message Service) to small groups of people. The original idea was to be able to send text messages to your friends over the Internet.

The first recognised Tweet was published on the 21st March 2006 by Jack Dorsey. It read, “just setting up my twttr.” (See Figure 1.)

Figure 1 Screenshot of the first Tweet, posted by Jack Dorsey (@jack).

An interesting feature of Twitter is its 140 character limit and not many people know why this is. SMS carriers have a character limit of 160 characters. The Twitter developers wanted to ensure every Tweet contained a user name, so they programmed a 140 character limit allowing 20 characters space to insert each tweeters username. (Hernandez, 2011)

In 2008 Twitter had passed the 1 Billion Tweets mark and by the time it turned three in 2009 Twitter had grown 1382%. In less than a year Twitter passed 5 Billion Tweets (2009) and in 2010 NASA Astronaught T. J. Creamer sent the first Tweet from space. 2010 saw a rise in Tweets to more than 50 Million per day just before its fourth birthday. (Hernandez, 2011)

The growth rate of Twitter was extremely quick as with most movements in the online social media world.

As of November 2012 Twitter had grown to have over 500 Million registered users, with 300 000 new visitors each day.(Bennett, 2012)

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Developments

Twitter continues to develop their features, layout, content and compatibility in order to maintain interest from users but also continue to attract new users at staggering rates.

The most current development from Twitter is an application called Vine, which was realised late January 2013. Vine is an application that allows you to Tweet a short 6-­‐second video.

In 2010 Twitter released a new interface that allowed for easier embedding of multimedia. It allowed for you to have a viewable image within your Tweet as well as the ability to post your location. More noticeable however was the ability to view linked videos from YouTube, Vimeo and other Video hosting sites.

Clicking a “View Video” link expands the Tweet to reveal an embedded video player within the feed. This means you no longer have to open video links in another browser window or tab.

This 2010 update also gave us the option to personalise our Twitter homepage, giving us the option to create our own banner, choose a pre-­‐made design theme or create our own. This meant users can now have complete control over the look of their page, allowing for better personal branding on Twitter. Before the update the only way to personalise you account was through your username, display picture and short about me paragraph.

Twitter developed a Widget, this allowed you to post a stream of your most recent tweets onto another website by simply copying HTML which Twitter creates for you. You are able to customise what the stream will look like in terms of style, however the layout remains fixed. Widgets allow for both businesses but also anyone with their own website to a have a way of posting fresh content to their site almost as often as they like.

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How It Works

Twitter is an online system that allows the user to broadcast short messages to a network of users through the use of the Internet and the Twitter website. Before it is possible for you to do this you need to know how Twitter works and what you need to do before you start Tweeting.

The first stage is to sign up to Twitter thus creating your Twitter Profile. This is an easy enough process but contains a very important stage in your Twitter life.

You need to choose your Twitter tag. This is the username that will follow the @ symbol and allow other users to find your account, follow you and message you.

You need to be extremely careful when choosing this tag, as you cannot change it once created. Due to the sheer amount of users on Twitter now it is more then likely that your @yourname is already taken therefore you need to be slightly more inventive. My Twitter tag for example is @car1991, car being my initials and 1991 my year of birth. When starting as a business, should you find that your business name is already taken with no viable other option. You can appeal to Twitter for them to take back and release the tag to you.

The next stage is to create your profile; this includes filling in your “about me” section and adding your interests, which allows for Twitter to make suggestions for you. By doing this Twitter will suggest people that share the same interests as you and give you the option of following them. Following them means that anytime the post in will appear in your feed for you to view. Twitter can also make suggestions based on your location.

Following people is the main way of gaining followers yourself. You don’t have to follow only people you know and can follow up to 2000 accounts with no problems. This is the way to begin building your Twitter Network. There are many hints and tips for increasing your network, some say following back anyone that follows you is good, others believe that simply saying thank you for the follow is enough to build up your community.

Of course gaining hundreds of followers certainly isn’t going to happen over night, the key is to stay active on Twitter posting updates regularly. This is something that is especially important for business users. “Engage your audience little and often. Communicate regularly and avoid intense bursts of activity followed by deathly silences”. (Brown, 2011)

There are further ways of using Twitter that I have yet to mention. You can post Tweets using your Mobile Telephone by texting your message to Twitter. This is more in line with what the site was originally designed to do, however with the development of smartphone’s and wireless nationwide Internet coverage, this method of tweeting is extremely dated. The more current method of Tweeting away from a PC is to download a Twitter application onto a mobile smartphone and tweet using that. The Twitter applications allow you to do almost everything you can do on a PC but from your mobile device, anywhere you have an Internet

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connection. These applications are also being used on mobile tablet devices such as iPads and Android/Blackberry alternatives.

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Tools for Businesses

Twitter’s Social Marketing statistics show that 50% of its active users follow companies or products and that 57% of all companies that use social media for business use twitter. (Bennett, 2012) It also provides a range of tools to allow businesses to connect to their customers in real-­‐time. For example it allows for business to “Promote Tweets and Trends”.

Promoting Tweets enables businesses to have their Tweets appear at the top of the feeds of their followers, people with the same interest as there followers, people within certain geographical locations as well as tailoring to mobile/pc users. Using promoted tweets does incur a cost to businesses but it is in the form of Cost per Engagement (CPE). You are only charged when someone clicks on, re-­‐ tweets or engages with your Tweet. The costs can be personally tailored to each business allowing for budgets of any size to use the feature. (Twitter, 2012)

Similarly to promoting tweets you can also promote trends, which drives users to create a conversation based on your brand. This is an excellent way of kick-­‐ starting a conversation around your brand, product or event as well as just attracting attention to your profile. If more followers is what you are after then Twitter also offers promoted accounts, where using the choices detailed above it recommends your account to be followed by new followers in the “Who to follow” section of the site. (Twitter, 2012)

Twitter also offers a range of analytical tools, allowing you to view the statistics of your Tweets as well as the ability to target your marketing to people who have an interest in your business. If offers you statistics on your followers, timeline activity, tweets and the amount of traffic you are driving to other websites. All of these tools are extremely important to analyse any marketing strategy.

There are many 3rd party applications such as SocialPointer, Twitalyzer, Hootsuite and many more that offer similar statistical tools to Twitter at a variety of costs. It is definitely worth researching these in order to find the best fitting product to your needs.

There are lots of little features Twitter offers that allow you to network your online presence with a more professional look. Twitter allows you to use its logo, including all varying forms to feature on your site or publications. They also supply a range of buttons including “Follow” and “Tweet” readymade for you to use.

There is also an option for developers to use Twitters API (Application Programming Interface) in order to create a much more branded use of Twitter for businesses. This does however require extensive knowledge of a range of coding methods and can become quite expensive to start using.

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Limitations

The main limitation of using Twitter appears to be the 140-­‐character limit. This limit, which is in place due to the character limit there is when using SMS carriers, is a factor that appears to put people/businesses off of using Twitter.

In my opinion the character limit means that tweeters have to ensure that they only tweet relevant and direct information. This means your feed remains free of cluttered paragraphs of text and full of snippets of direct information. The best use of Twitter for people who need to display large amounts of text is for them to link to another page hosting the text, either a blog or freestanding website. Their tweet therefore will only contain a brief statement and a web URL to another site.

By doing this however it does appear that Twitter allows itself to drive traffic away from it. This is something I feel they are trying to reduce by constantly updating their compatibility updates.

Twitter is becoming more and more compatible with the display of videos and images, however it is still impossible to display several albums of images or videos. This again means the use of an alternative hosting site is required for people wishing to do such.

There are many limitations to Twitter that are not know by many and affect even less however they do still exist. The first of which is a limit on the amount of Updates or Tweets you can send a day. You are limited to 1000 Tweets a day. In order to break this you would need to be tweeting almost 42 times an hour. Now this limitation most definitely shouldn’t affect any business users as tweeting this much would most definitely give your brand the image of being invasive and harassing.

The next limitation Twitter imposes is the amount of direct messages you can receive per day. A direct message on Twitter is a message from another user that remains hidden from the feeds and appears only to you. This is very useful for businesses wishing to gather responses via Twitter however with the limit it means an alternative method of contact must be used. For example by inserting an email address to allow email responses.

Finally there is a dynamic ratio Twitter sets to do with the amount of followers you have and how many people you can follow. It appears that once you are following 2000 users, you will encounter problems following more unless you are being followed yourself inline with this ratio. This ratio is in place to ensure that networks are built correctly and to try and combat against in-­‐active and fake accounts.

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Alternatives

There are ranges of alternative online social media sites that can be used for online marketing. Below I have highlighted a few of these and their main uses.

Facebook is the world’s largest Social Networking site with over 1 Billion monthly active Users. (Facebook, 2012) It allows you to publish a range of media and build an expansive network of friends. For businesses it allows targeted marketing with a range of demographic categories and the ability to build Apps for use within and outside of Facebook. There is a belief that Facebook is for building much more personal networks, however there is still a heavy presence of businesses advertising on Facebook. Facebook is extremely suited to B2C (Business to Consumer) marketing.

MySpace is a much older networking site, which was originally tailored around the world of music. At the moment however even after a recent re-­‐launch it is still seen as dated and thus has much smaller user rates then that of Facebook and Twitter.

Linkedin is a networking site designed for professionals to network. It is much more formal then Facebook, allowing you to upload curriculum vitaes, display your employment history, education and interests. It has limited chat features, and is much more designed for representing professionals and allowing them to establish their professionalism online. The majority of marketing on Linkedin is B2B (Business to Business) marketing.

YouTube is a video sharing site where users can upload videos, as well as view other users uploads. It has over 800 million unique users visits each month so is drawing immense traffic. (Youtube, 2012) Although there are options for advertising on YouTube, it is extremely hard to engage the audience as the forms include only web banners and videos.

Another alternative is to create your own Website. This is an extremely popular option and allows for you to get established online. It is becoming more and more easy to obtain a website with hundreds of companies being able to create a new site for you for minimal cost. There are also many ready-­‐made sites you can purchase where you simply fill in the required sections and choose the colours you want.

We must not forget more traditional alternatives to Social Media Marketing such as television ads, billboards, sponsorships and print advertising. However in an every increasing digital age these are rapidly becoming dated and cannot compete with the diversity and user engagement offer by digital social media marketing options.

It may need to be considered that the best way of marketing via social media would be to utilise all the above with a proportionate investment into each.

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Marketing Where to Start

The first stage in beginning to market using online social media is to consider your business type and decide which form will produce the best marketing material. Eileen Brown summarises this very well.

“…It’s no coincidence that the medium most often used to demonstrate the fun or quality of a new video game is video. Only through movement and monitoring actual game play can customers get a sense of what’s in it for them when they purchase the new first person shooter…” (Brown, 2011)

What’s being said here is that if your product is best marketed in video form, then an appropriate medium is required. In this case the best online social media marketing site is YouTube. Is you’re product or service is best described in the form of text, then it is much more wise to create an online blog with no character limit like you would find with Twitter.

You need to thing about what your brand represents, and how to maintain this online. When using a service such as Twitter you are going to become very intimate with your customers, as you will be able to receive messages directly from them. It is important to maintain strong branding on social media as a business as it can very easily become too personal.

It may be a good idea to create different social media accounts for different areas / people within your business. By doing this they may be able to engage with customers more freely without having to worry about being a direct representative of your brand.

You need to be in control of who is posting in your business account, and what they are posting. You need to ensure that you are only posting what is relevant to your business. Does your company need to make a statement about the last night’s soap opera storyline? Is this relevant to your marketing strategy and what your consumers want?

The phrase “Singing from the same Hymn sheet” comes to mind in that all of the businesses employees utilising social media must all adhere to what is best for the company at all times.

A final factor that needs to be considered is the quantity of Tweets that you will be posting. As I mentioned earlier Brown says you need to “engage your audience little and often.” (Brown, 2011) This means you need to maintain a constant flow of tweets. By this I don’t mean one every 15 mins, but maybe 2/3 a day, Monday-­‐ Friday. It is acceptable for most businesses to not Tweet outside of office hours however if your business operates out of normal hours then you need to consider this. A nightclub for example may be using Twitter to promote discounted drinks/ door entry before a certain time. There is little to be gained from Tweeting this early in the morning as most people will have forgotten the CONNOR RYAN 2813712 – RESEARCH PAPER

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details by the time they are due to go out. Tweeting this at 8pm however when people are just getting ready to leave for a club would be much more beneficial.

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The Market

It’s a well know fact that with any marketing you are going to need to consider your target market and research them. This normally involves profiling their demographics, age, gender, geographical location, career, etc, and occasionally they’re psychographics (interests, attitudes, opinions, morals, etc.).

On this basic level your main concern should be does your target market use social media? The Internet is full of statistics from various sources claiming to be the most up to date and accurate, however they all show that users between the ages of 16-­‐25 are the most active on social media. They also show that as age increases the usage of Social Media decreases. This is something every business needs to look at. There is very little point in using social media to advertise if your product/service is suited for a demographic that doesn’t use social media.

You need to ensure that you are actively engaging with your audience, not only through converse but also by re-­‐tweeting, favour ting and recommending people/ other businesses to follow. By doing this it will enhance your image as a social media user but also build you online network.

A very popular method of gaining more attention on Twitter is to advertise special offers/ discounts and deals exclusively to your followers. Add in, that they must re-­‐tweet your tweet in order to qualify for the deal and you will suddenly see your tweets appearing all over Twitter. With a carefully written tweet and decent deal on a wanted product, it will soon spread through Twitter like wildfire.

Twitter is very clever and as a business on Twitter you can make use of its excellent profiling systems. Twitter will look at the majority interests of your followers and then recommend new users for you to follow. It will also work the other way around, suggesting to users to follow your business. Using Twitters promoted account tool for businesses can enhance this feature.

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Your Brand

Brands are now appearing in a variety of forms, these include companies, religions, bands, football teams, celebrities and even individuals a few of the most successful brands are believed to be Coca-­‐Cola, Apple and David Beckham.

With this in mind it is important that you have a strong branded Image for your company and that you represent this through social media to your advantage.

The basics for representing your business on social media is to ensure that you utilise the company Logo and slogans to enable people to instantly recognise this online presence as being related to your Brand. But we need to take the branded Image idea much deeper to ensure success through social media.

We need to look at an example of a successful brand and see why it appears better then its competitors. For this I am going to look at the Example of the footballer David Beckham, as described in J. N. Kapferer’s The New Strategic Brand Management-­‐ Advanced Insights & Strategic Thinking.

Kapferer notes that there are many footballers as talented if not more so then David Beckham. However very few can be noted for being as successful as being a brand as Becks himself. The reasons for this he believes is due to the way in which the Beckham brand hand picks which sponsorships and other brands to represent, maintaining an extremely well kept image for the Beckham Brand.

This selection process see’s Beckham turning down a range of profitable sponsorships all to allow him to maintain his image. Kapferer notes that many over footballers simply except any offer of sponsorship without looking at the bigger picture of how it may represent them. (Kapferer, 2012)

What we need to take from this is that any business utilising social media needs to be extremely critical with regards to all of its online interactions. This includes not only other businesses it chooses to follow, but how much room it allows it’s followers to have an impact on its brand image. For example are you going to allow your followers to post viewable comments on your profile? You need to consider whether you want to have that user representing your brand, or whether it is better to only allow direct posts from you, or handpicked comments from followers.

The Twitter accounts that have the largest followings all belong to celebrities.

There are two accounts currently competing for the most followers, both hovering over the 33 Million-­‐follower mark and these belong to Lady Gaga and Justin Beiber. Similar to David Beckham these are extremely well managed brands/ accounts with a lot of thought into every post they publish and careful planning to what they link to.

There needs to be unity within your social media usage, if a range of staff will be able to publish online it is essential that they are all “singing from the same hymn sheet”. This unity is essential in ensuring that the ideology behind your brand is maintained.

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Good Practice

As Children the majority of us are taught manners and to be courteous by our parents. When using social media we must remember that we are representing ourselves (or our business) online and therefore remain well mannered and courteous to our followers.

Twitter offers advice for its business users on how to “Build your following, reputation, and customer’s trust” (Twitter, 2012). It offers 8 simple guidelines:

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Share. Share photos and behind the scenes info about your business. Even better, give a glimpse of developing projects and events. Users come to Twitter to get and share the latest, so give it to them!

Listen. Regularly monitor the comments about your company, brand, and products.

Ask. Ask questions of your followers to glean valuable insights and show that you are listening.

Respond. Respond to compliments and feedback in real time Reward. Tweet updates about special offers, discounts and time-­‐sensitive deals.

Demonstrate wider leadership and know-­how. Reference articles and links about the bigger picture as it relates to your business.

Champion your stakeholders. Retweet and reply publicly to great tweets posted by your followers and customers.

Establish the right voice. Twitter users tend to prefer a direct, genuine, and of course, a likable tone from your business, but think about your voice as you Tweet. How do you want your business to appear to the Twitter community?

These are some extremely valuable tips from Twitter and it is essential to ensure you start following them right from the off to ensure that you project the correct image of your brand on social media right from the launch. There are a few other tips however that as a business starting on social media you can use to maintain a good online reputations.

Firstly I cannot emphasise how important it is to welcome and thank your followers. This is an extremely good way of gaining more followers, as networking is not a one-­‐way process. Leading on from this is to follow back your followers. This is seen as good practice as it shows that as a brand you are taking an active interest in the lives of the people who follow you. Thirdly thank anyone who re-­‐tweets, favourites or recommends you. They are after all exposing your brand to a wider audience on the network.

Social Media is the second most direct method of communicating with your customers outside of meeting face to face. It is therefore important to ensure that you are giving excellent customer service via Twitter. To do this efficiently via social media you need to regularly monitor your social sites and respond as soon as possible to any messages you receive from customers. This is extremely important when dealing with negative messages as it shows you are actively dealing with the matter.

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Current Strategy, Will it Work?

When using social media for marketing for the first time, you will be expanding you’re marketing campaign however you may need to consider creating a new campaign all together.

You wouldn’t use the same publications to be distributed across different advertising mediums, they would all be tailored to suit and this is something you will need to consider when using social media. Certain types of adverts and messages are more effective in social media then others and so you will need to tailor at least some aspects of your marketing campaign.

An amazing ability of social media is the interactivity you can have with consumers and this is most definitely an area you will need to work on. Simply uploading dull, analogue images as advertising is not going to work on this contemporary marketing platform. You need to ensure you are engaging with the audience through making them re-­‐tweet, favourite and promote your brand.

Social media is an excellent way to spread a message to a large audience. In a marketing sense you can utilise this to spread a link to a website or ad campaign.

I’m not going to tell you how to make the ads effective but it needs to be bared in mind that you want users to re-­‐tweet and share the link so make sure that it is an experience the user will want to share to their network.

An excellent way of using more analogue forms of media advertising to support your digital campaign is to advertise links to your digital campaigns. So include not only you web URL but also your Twitter @tag and Facebook address. This gives viewers of your adverts the chance to engage with your brand through Social Media. Quick Response Codes are another way of allowing consumers to access your online content almost instantly through scanning a barcode like image using apps on their smartphones.

Another extremely important thing to do is link all your online presences together. Make sure that not only can followers access your Website through your Twitter page, but also your Facebook, YouTube, Blog, Linkedin and any other relevant media pages. If all of your accounts do this, you will see a much improved flow of traffic to all sites as it becomes extremely easy for users to navigate.

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Figure 2 Precedent UK Financial Sector Report 2011 (Porter, 2011)

The above image created by Precedent UK’s head of Research Adrian Porter shows an idealised user journey through a company’s digital landscape. This is the flow that you would hope to have in your digital landscape to ensure the most efficient user engagement and activity.

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Peer to Peer

Peer to Peer online conversations or eWom (electronic word of mouth) is the communication of the online networking community. It describes the sharing of not only textual messages but also images, videos, links and files. EWom is the easiest way of gaining attention online due to the ease of sending messages through social networks but also the sizes of networks that can see these messages.

Electronic Word of Mouth can have both positive and negative effects. In a positive situation it can gain a business thousands if not millions of followers in a very short time. However in a negative situation it can ruin a company’s reputation in a few hours. It is much more effective then traditional advertising methods and works unlike any other established communication method.

The world Viral is a term that is used to describe a piece of media that has been passed through eWom from peer to peer online and has attributed a large viewing. This media is traditionally video form however more and more images (especially Memes) and text-­‐based stories are becoming viral.

An example of eWom working in a positive environment is its role in getting the band Rage Against the Machine with their song “Killing in the name of” to the position of Christmas number one in 2009.

Starting as an idea by Jon and Tracy Morter in opposition to the winner of the Christmas number one having been won by an Xfactor contestant the previous few years. They started a group on Facebook encouraging people to instead purchase a Rage Against the Machine song from 1992 in order to take the profits away from the Xfactor. With help from the Twitter Community including support from a range of celebrities the official Facebook page grew to have 1 Million Members with an un-­‐known amount of members following the range of un-­‐ official pages. This following was created almost entirely through eWom in an extremely short period of time. (Gould, 2009)

RATM beat the opposition by 50 000 purchases in the Christmas of 2009.

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Effectiveness Positives

By using the above mentioned methods, investing time and energy into marketing through Twitter. It is a certainty that you will see results in the forms of a large community networking with your business. Then by broadcasting adverts to this community you should be able to see a much better return on your adverts, this of course is made possible by the ability to target the audience that suits your business/brand.

The Twitter accounts with the largest followings don’t just have a few thousands followers but in excess of 30 Million. Looking at the top few including Lady Gaga on 30Million, Justin Beiber just in second and Katy Perry just behind we need to recognise this people as not only celebrities but carefully managed brands that now have the ability to directly advertise to 30 Million People worldwide.

(Daniells, 2013)

Twitter’s business tools are offering an excellent way of targeting the people that you need to get following your business on Twitter before allowing eWom to take over and enable massive growth. There are numerous possibilities then of interacting and engaging with the active audience you now how access to.

The direct contact social media will give you to your clients is second only to them visiting your business in person. It allows you to converse in your own time on a personal level and build a successful B2C or even B2B relationship.

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Negatives

The problem with attracting negative attention on social media is that with eWom it can spread like wildfire throughout the online network. With the ability of Twitter to be able to track keywords and then display posts containing those words it is all too easy for negative comments/events to be made accessible globally.

Social media also has the ability to be able to group large amounts of pressure upon certain individuals or business’. In 2008 Dave Carroll a musician was flying with United Airlines in America with his guitar. On boarding the flight he noticed ill handling of the luggage being boarded onto the plane. On arriving at his destination he discovered damage to his guitar and began a complaints process.

This took several months and eventually he was ‘fobbed off’ by the airline. He threatened United Airlines that he would make a video of his story and post it online (hoping that it would go Viral and gain negative attention for the airline).

They had no response to his threat.

‘United Breaks Guitars’ written and performed by Dave Carroll received over 8 Million views on YouTube in only a matter of days. This prompted United Airlines to take immediate action responding the Dave Carroll and “putting things right”. (Carroll, 2009)(Brown, 2011)

The pressure United Airlines were put under knowing that 8 Million people had seen not only how poorly luggage was treated by them but also customers, forced them to take immediate action to combat this negative attention.

This is only one example of many where the “Peer Pressure” that can build over the Internet can have a direct effect not only on a company’s reputation but also on an individuals.

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Conclusion

This research paper has shown a range of findings about Twitter and marketing.

It has looked at the combination of both and how this can affect an online audience.

The purpose of this paper was to determine what factors are enabling Twitter to be the effective marketing tool that we know it to be through its use by a large range of businesses. Twitter is an effective marketing tool due to not 1 reason but a range. These reasons include not only the platform itself and the tools it provides to business’ to assist with marketing, but also the wide audience that can be reached and the variety in which you can engage with them.

Through looking at the social media platform of Twitter, more specifically its origin, growth, development and features. We can see that although only being 6 years old it is already massively popular worldwide which is supported by the fact of its 500 Million registered users and with the fact that over 1 billion tweets were sent within its first two years of operation, that users are extremely active on the network.

Then moving on to look at how marketing can work using Twitter. We see that there are a variety of techniques that can be used effectively on Twitter. For example by running competitions, linking your online digital landscape, establishing strong branding through use of the customisable layout and theme, as well as just generalised audience engagement.

This paper does suggest more positive elements to marketing through Twitter then negative. However as I have suggested the power of social media is not something to be underestimated and so adequate steps must be taken and a strict code conformed to in order to maintain a positive social media marketing experience.

This research allows an enhanced view of the correct way to market a business on Twitter. Through resourcing a range of texts written by professionals within the marketing, branding and social media industries I have been able to collate their established views on what makes Twitter an effective Marketing tool.

The main limitation to this study is that due to the size and nature of Twitter, it has been difficult to see patterns in the marketing strategies in a range of businesses of different sizes. There are now so many businesses on Twitter trying to collate information about how all of them use the platform for marketing although being extremely beneficial would have been an impossible task for my paper to accomplish. Further limitations include my shallow look at marketing as an Individual on Twitter. Although I touch on this subject, there is much possibility for a further paper into this area as it is something we are seeing more and more on Twitter, persons marketing themselves in order to attract a bigger following.

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Further areas of investigation would include looking directly at sales figures taken from businesses before and after their launch on Twitter. By gathering this information and collating it in-­‐line with their investments and effort put into marketing through Twitter, we would be able to see a definite answer as to whether marketing on Twitter has a positive/negative effect on sales in correlation to investment.

A further continuation to this study would take an alternative view of the marketing seen on Twitter through the eyes of a consumer. This continuation could include a range of methodical approaches including surveys and interviews. By doing this we would be able to see the effects different social media marketing strategies have on the consumer and with comparison to a sales figures based investigation would be able to draw more in depth conclusion into the most effective social media marketing methods.

Although this paper can be seen as a generalised guide for business into the do’s and do not’s of marketing on Twitter. It needs to be made clear, as I have mentioned in the Where To Start chapter (p13.) that Twitter may not be the most appropriate online advertising medium for every product/ business. Careful consideration needs to be taken into deciding where to advertise online or you may find a wasted investment of time and money.

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