How To Use Twitter As A Brand
Methods and Tools to help you define your strategy with three different approaches to the platform
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As you define your digital marketing strategy, you’ll definitely come across the dilemma of using Twitter as a social media platform:
I’m here to tell you a little bit about that and, hopefully, to help you make a decision.
First of all, there are three different approaches to Twitter:
Active approach
This is the most immediate approach to be thought of and it consists of developing a real presence for the brand, by using the brand’s own account and interacting on the platform with it.
With this approach, you’ll be creating a profile to use as your shopping window on Twitter and you have different possibilities when it comes to the type of profile you want to create.
There are different accounts you can use on Twitter and your choices are between brand, corporate account, press office, or other accounts that you can use for your brand’s specific needs (to do customer care for example). What needs to be mentioned is, when you’re defining your Profile Name and your User Name it is not necessary for them to be the same-
corporate account.
Passive Approach
This is an interesting approach that can be used during the process of defining your marketing strategy. While it doesn’t allow the brand to create a reputation on Twitter, it does permit you to analyze Tweets by using different instruments available to monitor what happens on the social network.
This way of being on Twitter helps to exploit the info available. This can be done because Twitter is an open social network and tweets can be easily searched for on the internet.
Thanks to the passive approach you have a powerful instrument to find out about trends and competitors.
You can use it to follow and engage in a trend before it gets to other social media platforms (like hashtags or memes). How can you get the information you’re looking for? There are some free or freemium instruments as well as some tools that are available at a cost.
Among the free tools, we should definitely mention the platform itself. Twitter has a search function that allows us to search for anything, also using some advanced search parameters to filter out useless content. Other freemium software (that have a free version as well as a premium one) is Tweetdeck (acquired by Twitter), which can be used to manage publishing from different profiles or for data search purposes, and Keyhole which focuses more on keywords and hashtag analysis.
The premium tools are more apt for the sue on behalf of agencies but still, they are worth a mention, perhaps to manage big brands that outsource to freelancers or that do everything on their own. One of these is Blogmeter, a site that provides an analysis of various aspects allowing you to select multiple topics you want to constantly monitor and to analyze brand followers.
Endorsed Approach
There are various side-effects to the use of this method as the sole interaction on Twitter, however, as the name says, it can be used to create actions that are then amplified using the help of active users or influences on Twitter.
Using endorsements exclusively is not for everyone. The risk is becoming a brand with no voice, a brand that cannot interact in case of needed crisis management, a brand that can’t give a link for more information. Brands that use the endorsement method alone also have issues directing traffic to their websites and, without a follower base, being endorsed on a social media platform can be rather counterproductive.
You may consider being endorsed and also having an active approach to use the platform at its best and still, you may have a doubt about where to find influencer profiles in your industry or to evaluate the real return these influencers can give your brand. You can do this with Klout or Blogmeter, as well as Tweepi and ManageFlitter. If instead, you don’t want to do all the work, you can always hire someone from Buzoole or similar services to do the job for you.
