Analyzing Your Twitter Activities

Twitter is a short message communication tool that allows you to send out messages (‘tweets’) up to 140 characters long to individuals who subscribe to your tweets (your followers). Because of this character limit, Twitter is called a ‘microblogging’ service. A service that allows for two-way communications.

There are other microblogging tools on the market - Tumblr, FriendFeed and Plurk, for example – but Twitter is by far most widely used. According to Twitter, Inc. as of November 2014, there are 284 million monthly active users (80% use smartphones or tablets). 500 million tweets are sent every day in 35+ languages. Which creates a pretty serious corporate communications opportunity for both B2B and B2C companies.

Each tweet can include a link to any web content (blog post, website page, PDF document, etc.) or a picture or video. Which allows you to share large multimedia messages and hypertext documents of practically unlimited size and complexity.

Others follow (subscribe to) your Twitter account, and you follow their accounts receiving their messages. This allows you to read, reply to and easily share their tweets with your followers (‘retweet’ them).

There are five types of messages in Twitter:

1.      Tweet: a message you send out to everyone who follows you. You can – and must! – use this to influence your clients and other stakeholders to generate sales, profits, cash flows and financial value for your company.

2.      @Reply: a message you send out as a reply to a message you received. You will use this for clarifying your initial message to your stakeholder and the feedback from the latter. Or simply for strengthening the relationship with the specific stakeholder.

3.      Mention: a message you send out that mentions another Twitter username. Can be useful to point to an independent expert that can endorse your company, brands, products and/or services.

4.      Direct message (DM): a message you send privately to another Twitter user. You can only send a DM to someone who follows you. Can be very useful when you are discussing particularly sensitive feedback or a customized (and therefore private) proposal.

5.      Retweet: a message created and sent by someone else that you share with the people who follow you. You can use it for sharing favorable information about company, brands, products and/or services generated by a reputable and independent source.

Like your corporate Web site, your mobile apps or anything and everything else in your company, your Twitter activities have but one fundamental objective – making money for your company. In other words, generating financial value. And other components of aggregate value – functional and emotional.

There are essentially three ways in which your Twitter activities can make money for your company:

1.      Motivate your client to purchase your products and/or services using your tweets, mentions, direct messages and retweets.

2.      Obtain valuable feedback from your stakeholders using @Replies. This feedback will allow you to make better decisions and to execute them in more efficient way. Which will increase your sales, profits, free cash flows, financial value and other financial KPI.

3.      Obtain valuable information from users, competitors, industry experts, government entities, etc. Information that will allow you to make better decisions and to execute them in more efficient way. Which will increase your sales, profits, free cash flows, financial value and other financial KPI.

To make it all possible, you will need to bring on board an experienced and highly competent Twitter professional. Who will use the optimal methodology, business process and an operational plan for your Twitter activities. Obviously, these activities must be tightly integrated into your corporate communications systems.

 These activities must match your KEF (especially social and cultural), your marketing strategy (ideally, your Twitter activities must have their own strategy), your UVP, your corporate culture and code of conduct.

To make these activities successful, your Twitter manager must build an optimal list of your followers (your stakeholders) and Twitter accounts to follow. Also, you will need to design, develop and implement a highly efficient corporate process of extracting valuable knowledge from information in your received Twitter messages.