An introduction to Twitter, what it does, how it's used and some best practices for businesses.

1. IS TWITTER?

2. AGENDA
What is Twitter?
What should I tweet about?
Increasing Engagement
Increasing the size of the Community
Customer Service on Twitter
Potential obstacles and how to manage them
Negative feedback & crisis management
Reporting – how to measure your success
Best Practices (cheat sheet)
Twitter and Traffika

3. WHAT IS TWITTER?
• People sharing information, opinions and
conversations, 140 characters at a time.
• Simple platform
• Text is main medium
• Makes for multiple uses
• Different people use it in entirely different ways

4. WHAT IS TWITTER?
• Launched mid-2006
• Cemented social media as a truly ‘mobile’
platform (smartphones, Facebook followed
suit)
• Around 50-60 million tweets per day
• Twitter traffic is largely influenced by
immediate events - e.g. announcements,
shows, awards, news, events

5. COMPONENTS OF A PROFILE Who you’re
Name, Twitter Who you’re followed by
handle and bio following Number of times
you’ve been listed
Tweets published Similar profiles to yours (based on keywords
tweeted, location)

6. HOW IS TWITTER USED?
• People connecting with friends
• Businesses connecting with customers
• Governments connecting with citizens
• Astronauts connecting with earth
• Businesses publishing content
• People ‘following their interest’

7. THE IMMEDIATE EFFECT

8. PROLIFIC TWITTERERS
Profile Followers (Apr 2011)
@LadyGaga 9,452,797
@justinbieber 8,949,199
@britneyspears 7,506,100
@barackobama 7,444,505
@KimKardashian 7,196,765
@KatyPerry 6,743,980
@aplusk 6,570,052
@TheEllenShow 6,420,857
@taylorswift13 6,021,585
@oprah 5,622,592

9. TWITTER FOR BUSINESSES

10. SELECTING THE RIGHT CONTENT
• Refer to your overall business objectives and
find/produce content that supports these.
• Find out what your followers are interested in
and associate your content with that.

11. SELECTING THE RIGHT CONTENT
• Which celebrities do they follow?
• Which other profiles do they engage with?
• What content do they share on their own profile?
• Are they interested in real estate, the stock market, food,
travel, rugby?
• These trends can influence your brand’s Twitter engagement
strategy
• They can also uncover opportunities for your broader
marketing strategy.

12. INCREASING ENGAGEMENT
• Make sure the content is likeable and shareable (what would
you share on your profile?)
• Ask for engagement (often overlooked)
• Make sure the content is topical and relevant to the audience
• Make your Twitter profile
approachable by responding
to and sharing content from
within your community

13. GROWING THE COMMUNITY
• Follow profiles and brands which have similar audiences
to yours
• Doesn’t have to be in the same industry (e.g.
@VirginBlue follows @Mick_Fanning)
• Focus the content on Word-Of-Mouth sharing
• What would people want to talk about at the water-
cooler? “did you hear...” stories

14. GROWING THE COMMUNITY
• Publish content relevant to the audience you want to
attract
• Growing a rich and loyal following is better than
generating a ‘large’ following.
• in some cases less is better
• be there for your followers
• Growing your community requires long term
commitment, particularly for brands
• There is a tipping point, but don’t hold your breath

15. CUSTOMER SERVICE ON TWITTER
• Be a good listener
• Monitor and listen all the time (there are tools to help
you do this)
• Listen to the problems, opinions,
thoughts of your followers
• React and respond quickly and
accordingly
• Overcome their obstacles / pain points
– give them an excuse to like your brand

16. RESPONDING TO MENTIONS
• Be genuine and honest in your responses (if
you don’t know the answer immediately, let
them know you will respond later)
• Responses to @-replies should be made a
priority, particularly if they are positive.
• Think of them as someone holding up their hand
for a high-five - don’t leave them hanging

17. RESPONDING TO MENTIONS
• For brand mentions, the response is determined by the
nature of the mention
• If it’s a positive mention - respond as soon as possible
and try to engage the person further - ask them a
question, ask for their opinion, can you help further?
• Draw attention to it.
• Negative or derogatory mentions often require more
measured responses. Avoid knee-jerk or defensive
reactions
• Apologise only if you are at fault for a mistake - lots of
apologies looks bad on your Twitter profile

18. POTENTIAL OBSTACLES
• Lack of time to manage the account
• Automate as much as possible (but don’t over-
automate)
• schedule tweets
• set up email alerts for monitoring
• set up phone/sms alerts for mentions
• Allocate specific times of the day to respond to
mentions
• If you work to an 8 hour response time, schedule
15mins every few hours to respond and direct issues to
the right people
• Be diligent with responses – they can pile up

19. POTENTIAL OBSTACLES
• Sounding too “corporate”
• Think of it as a telephone call between you and your
customers,
• Use a conversational tone
• try to keep it relaxed
• On the other hand avoid being too informal
• Bear in mind all your different followers and their values (personal
and cultural).
• Don’t tweet anything you wouldn’t say in front of a crowd
• Remember, you don’t have to ‘sound’
like your audience.
• Don’t be the Dad with his cap sideways
• Maintain your authority
• Consider it as a way to extend your
brand’s voice - be kind and helpful

20. NEGATIVE FEEDBACK
• For negative tweets, respond as soon as
possible
• Turn a negative into a positive
• Try to empower the person by giving them
choices, e.g. “We’d be happy to resolve this for
you... would you prefer us to email or call?”
• Humanise the assistance by identifying exactly
who will be contacting the person, e.g. “Manesh
will give you a call tomorrow morning”

21. NEGATIVE FEEDBACK
• Turning a negative into a
positive
• It generally doesn’t take much
to resolve small grievances
• One of the main pain-points
for customers is the
communication barrier
between them and you.
• Sometimes people just want a
little attention

22. NEGATIVE MENTIONS
• Inflammatory or abusive tweets (racist, sexist,
abusive language)
• No need to respond to these people
• Remember, the content will not appear on your feed
and it’s unlikely that other people will engage them in
relation to your brand.

23. CRISIS MANAGEMENT
• Dealing with a barrage of negative tweets
• Things have to go pretty wrong for this to happen - proper
management will diffuse problems before they get too big
• If it does happen, remember it’s very difficult to reason
with a mob.
• Generally the best course of action is to let the issue run
its course, formulate a response and reply when the anger
has died down
• Determine at which point you should involve the PR team
• if possible come up with some benchmarks, or at which
point it becomes a ‘crisis’.
• e.g. 20 negative responses on the same topic

24. WHAT MAKES TWITTER TERRIBLE?
• Companies trying the hard-sell
• Twitter is not a shouting board for your brand
• Think about a TV ad for a carpet sale and do the opposite
• Sale messages are one-way - Twitter is two-way
• Talk less about your products,
and more about the community
• Unless you know your
community only wants to hear
sale messages

25. WHAT MAKES TWITTER TERRIBLE?
• Brands and people who only talk about themselves
• As a general rule, around a quarter of your tweets should mention the
brand
• The other 75% should be general interest content focused on getting
shares and replies from your community.

26. WAT MAKES TWITTER TERRIBLE?
• Brands who are absent
• Those which treat Twitter as a broadcast platform don’t
respond
• Twitter gives brands a chance to listen to and talk with
their customers
• So why wouldn’t you do it?
• It’s easy to over-automate - pluging in a number of RSS
feeds (using HootSuite) which will automatically publish
content to the feed.
• This should generally be avoided but if so make sure someone is
there to respond

27. WHAT MAKES TWITTER TERRIBLE?
• Overtweeting
• Generally 4 to 6 outbound tweets per day is
acceptable
• Too many and you block up people’s feeds
• Too few and your brand will lack presence
• Try and space them out during the day
• Lack of tracking and measurement
• You can’t improve on what you don’t measure.
• Define metrics like clicks, followers, replies,
ReTweets, website traffic and website sales to
measure the success of your efforts
• Gather the data then take action

28. MEASURING SUCCESS
• How do you know that what you’re doing is working?
• Generally, an increase in followers is a good indication
that you are attracting people to your profile
• Through UTM-tagging (tagging all in-bound links to your
website) you will be able to measure the amount of
traffic generated by Twitter
• From here you can determine the quality of this traffic
through Analytics
• For an e-commerce site, this is where you work out the
REAL value of your Twitter followers.
• Track the number of clicks through HootSuite
• there is analytics behind the ow.ly url shortener

29. MEASURING SUCCESS
• Using a third party monitoring application like
BuzzNumbers will provide detailed analytics on the
number of mentions of you, your brand and its
competitors
• Will give insights into the sentiment of the mentions
(positive, neutral or negative)
• For our clients Buzz and sentiment is generally
reported on Monthly
• Shorter time-frames can be used to track specific
tactical campaigns, e.g. launch of a TVC or a Press
Release

30. BEST PRACTICES
• Share
• Photos, video, links, information
• Behind-the-scenes info about you, your people and your brand
• First-look images / video
• Be a good listener
• Monitor comments about your company and competitors
• Listen to what your community says, about everything (not just your business)
• Get to know your most active tweeters (through the right nurturing they will become your
advocates)
• Ask questions
• Find out what they want, then give it to them
• Respond in real time
• Doesn’t have to be immediate, but don’t leave them hanging
• Demonstrate leadership
• You are the authority
• Give your followers access to the bigger superannuation picture
• Reward your influencers
• ReTweet and publicly reply to high quality content from your followers
• Establish your brand’s voice
• Friendly, helpful, approachable, honest

31. CHEAT SHEET
Before each tweet, ask the following questions:
• Does the content abide by your brand’s content
policies?
• Is there an avenue for engagement … does it
pose a question?
• Does it add value?
• Are you being honest?
• Does it have a positive sentiment?
• Does it allow room for RTs or re-posts? (110
chars)
• Speak it out loud… does it make sense?

32. TRAFFIKA AND TWITTER
• We:
• Recommend Twitter
• Don’t recommend Twitter (unsuitable business, lack of
resources, etc)
• Advise and consult on Twitter strategies
• Schedule Twitter content
• Optimise content distribution
• Use Twitter ourselves to…
• Publish content
• Answer questions
• Build on the Traffika brand community
• Build the Traffika community
• Extend the Traffika experience
• Generate leads

33. ANY QUESTIONS?
Ask us in the comments below