Simply Zesty » Twitter – Simply Zesty

Handy tool shows you where your Twitter followers are from

Lauren Fisher — Sat, 13 Aug 2011 21:12:41 +0000

A new Twitter tool has just launched, that allows you to track where the majority of your Twitter followers are from. Twocation tracks the top countries your Twitter followers are based and though it may seem like just a quirky tool to use and tweet about, it actually provides an incredibly useful piece of insight to brands and individuals, which is currently lacking within Twitter. The site is very easy to use. You simply connect through your Twitter account to be given a percentage breakdown of your followers by location, with the top 3 locations presented as a summary, as well as scrolling down to a full country breakdown in full. And thankfully, the site doesn’t auto-tweet for you, but does provide you with an editable tweet to share the site with your followers.

The site was developed by David Barker and what I believe Barker has done is highlight a huge gap in Twitter’s current offering and the lack of analytics that they provide to users. Twocation is useful particularly for larger brands who may gather large followings on Twitter, but without really knowing if they’re attracting and speaking to the right people. Location is something that Twitter have kind of dabbled in themselves, but with services like adding location to your tweets not really taking off or working to its full potential that it could.

Why do other people do Twitter better?

When Twitter decided earlier in the year that they were very much cutting off their relationships with developers and removing API support for apps they deemed against their terms of use, not only did they piss a lot of people off, but they also made a pretty big statement that they felt they could offer their users much more than other developers could. As twocation shows however, this isn’t necessarily the case. Consistently, developers (often working with no monetisation route) provide us with little tools and plugins for Twitter that improve the service and give us the kind of thing they really need. For some reason with Twitter in particular, ,this has consistently been the case and it shows the huge risk they took by distancing themselves from developers.

This is impacting Twitter’s long term value in a very real way. It seems that since they decided they could do things better themselves, their native functionality has been going down in quality and effectiveness. Twitter’s own search function has been incredibly shaky lately, seemingly missing many results. I often find more results coming in through Tweetdeck than are detected within Twitter search. And this is again something not developed by Twitter, as they acquired the search engine summize.com 2008 to be their official search tool, before discontinuing the service as it existed at search.twitter.com completely. Twitter are playing a risky game here. The more they work against developers (and this is by no means their total approach), the more they risk halting development of useful apps like this.

The need for analytics

One thing Twitter needs to get right (and quickly) is the analytics offered to all users, whether larger accounts, verified, brands or individuals. This is something that Facebook has got right very early on and what it means is that brands focus more time, money and energy on the site, as they’re able to track their activities effectively to see what is/isn’t working and adapting the strategy accordingly. With Twitter, the information provided on your own account is minimal. The level of tweets a service like Twocation is getting from high profile tweeters, shows the clear need for this. For brands, this tool will be absolutely invaluable to their use of Twitter and it will hopefully contribute to Twitter consolidating this into a full, free analytics package for users.

Can celebrity endorsement on Twitter keep a business alive?

Lauren Fisher — Sat, 13 Aug 2011 14:03:24 +0000

Celebrities and Twitter have gone hand in hand not quite from day one, but from the very early days of Twitter, when it became clear how celebrities could use it to build a following that could be utilised their new products or launches directly in front of consumers. We’ve had celebrity battles on Twitter between Oprah and Ashton Kutcher, celebrities in trouble on Twitter and more than a few high profile celebrity impersonators. But the power of Twitter for celebrities is extending far beyond building a reach for their own work, into supporting other businesses in return for financial reward (though this isn’t always the case). For the celebrities, it works rather nicely. You build your following, invest in products, tweet about the products and then reap the rewards. But is celebrity endorsement on Twitter alone enough to sustain a business? A new flash sale site suggests it might be.

Demi Moore and Fab.com

The flash sale site Fab.com has is receiving a lot of support from a powerhouse celebrity couple, in Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore. Kutcher originally invested in the site and since then, his wife has sent 3 separate tweets about products on the site. The people at Fab.com have found that their top selling products all relate back to Demi’s tweets, showing the power of celebrity endorsement, updated for the 21st century and through social channels.

Now while a little bit of disclosure wouldn’t go amiss, considering Moore’s relationship with one of the investors, it’s an important finding by Fab, in showing how influence on Twitter can actually affect purchasing decisions and directly be monetised. Fab.com is a new business that’s heavily invested in social media as a method of marketing and it’s interesting to see how just a few tweets from a celebrity on Twitter can outperfrom other marketing efforts and channels, with such clearly measurable results.

In this case, it shows that celebrity endorsement on Twitter alone can keep a business going and be one of the most important sources of new business and traffic. For many brands of course, it’s fairly elusive to generate this celebrity endorsement through Twitter. It depends on your contacts and, largely, how much cash you have to flash. As more and more celebrities get into this business end of Twitter however, it could become a more accessible channel for brands and a completely new way of marketing your product. While celebrity endorsement on its own is almost as old as the notion of ‘celebrity’ itself, this is unique through Twitter as for the first time the person has an instant and portable fanbase to communicate to.

Numbers alone won’t do it

The power of celebrity endorsement on Twitter is unique, because it shows that influence in social media isn’t just about numbers. With a Twitter account nearing 4 million followers, Moore can ensure she gets in front of a vast audience, but the profile behind the tweeter has a large part to play. Moore has power on Twitter because she didn’t just create brand awareness for Fab, but was actually able to facilitate this brand awareness transferring into sales. This is where influence in social media begins to come into its own. Celebrities can support businesses like this because their influence extends outside of Twitter itself. They bring a following that’s loyal to them outside of Twitter alone. Influence is in the hands of the person, not just their Twitter account.

A new business model for Twitter?

With Twitter’s attempts to monetise the site in new ways, the power of celebrities to prop up businesses online could throw up a new business opportunity for Twitter. Essentially they are the gateway between celebrities and their followers, brands and consumers. This represents a unique revenue opportunity for Twitter, to monetise this relationship. This has to be handled carefully of course. We’re not talking about brands having a direct ‘in’ to buy a tweet from a celebrity – that’s ultimately detrimental to the way in which Twitter functions. But developing a more organic and flexible approach to hook up brands with celebrities on Twitter could be Twitter’s biggest untapped opportunity yet.

Twitter themselves clearly have an interesting in developing the celebrity side of the business, with recent changes to verified accounts allowing any follower to send them a DM, as opposed to having to be followed back. It could well be that as their advertising options currently look a bit shaky, they’re seeking to change up their approach to celebrity/verified accounts and their role as a platform to facilitate the relationships between celebrities and brands.

New app allows you to send anyone a private message on Twitter

Lauren Fisher — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 17:17:16 +0000

We previously wrote about an upcoming change from Twitter that allowed you to send private messages to larger/celebrity accounts even if they weren’t following you. Now there’s a new app (not from Twitter) that allows you to send a private message to anyone, regardless of whether they’re following you or not. This is done through Twitgram, which you can use to compose your message without a 140 character limit, to send directly to the user you want. It’s all possible through the web interface for Twitgram :

At the moment the site is a little buggy and it takes a while for the message to go through. I also wonder how long this site will be allowed to exist for!

Do people really want this?

While this is no doubt a good feature if you have an interest in reaching someone that isn’t following you, it essentially goes completely against the way in which Twitter functions, where private contact was completely controlled as there had to be mutual consent. I’m sure there will be a lot of interest in an app like this, but the long term value of it is negligible. As the site works by sending the user a DM with a link to view your message, you’re alerted straight away to the fact that you’re being contacted privately by someone you didn’t choose to follow. Would you be bothered to click on the link if you knew this was the case? At the moment the etiquette within Twitter is to send an @reply to someone to request a follow so they can DM you. It’s a little clunky, but it’s worked up to now. What do you think – do you think this is yet another good feature that Twitter didn’t introduce themselves, or is it something people don’t really want or need?

Group messaging

What is nice about this site, is that it also allows you to send group messages, by entering more than one @name in the recipient field. This is perhaps the best thing that Twitgram has going for it, as this isn’t a function currently available within Twitter but is certainly needed. Twitter themselves certainly recognise the value in groups, through functions released such as Lists, which allow you to group users together according to a common theme. Again, the group messaging feature might seem like a feature too far beyond what Twitter originally wanted to offer, but it seems like a natural feature for Twitter to offer. Let’s see if they go for a talent acquisition at Twitgram to integrate the technology and build out the native offerings on the site…

Why Twitter needs to wake up and start working with businesses

Lauren Fisher — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 08:26:44 +0000

There has been no shortage of articles claiming that Google+ will outperform Facebook and Twitter by next year and while I take these articles with a pinch of salt, as there’s a big difference between early uptake in users and long-term value, Twitter is independently risking leaving themselves behind. They have been making a lot of headlines recently with important changes to the site, the team and their work with advertisers. But are they making the right decisions, or is it a case of too little too late? Right now of course, Twitter is still going strong, but the longer-term implications of changes to the site and the company remain to be seen, and the future isn’t necessarily all that bright.

Not getting on well with businesses

Twitter have been much slower than most to work alongside businesses. Facebook’s willingness to accommodate brands, though it may not have been how Zuckerberg originally saw the site, is the main reason they continue to go from strength to strength. They recognised the need to monetise the site early on and found unique ways to accommodate businesses in addition to advertising through Pages and groups. This gave Facebook a completely unique advantage over other social networks as brands had a ‘safe’ space where they were permitted to set up a presence and interact with consumers. Twitter has yet to really accommodate brands on the site, other than through advertising.

While some may see this as detrimental to the overall user experience on Twitter, the fact is that if they are to continue to grow and sustain themselves as a business, they need to become more attractive to businesses. Advertising alone won’t do it, as most brands want to offset social media advertising with more organic activity and a place to build a long-term community. The nature of advertising on Twitter is that it’s very much around being one quick hit. A lot of advertising doesn’t lead to a Twitter profile but rather promotes an external site, which makes it more akin to banner advertising than social advertising. This isn’t what brands want anymore and though Twitter has recently made changes to their advertising offering, the social aspect still isn’t strong enough, which will put a lot of companies off.

Threat from Foursquare?

Other social networks are showing their willingness to work with brands and Foursquare is the latest social network to formalise this. They have recently introduced self-serve business pages. While businesses had branded pages on Foursquare before, these weren’t self-serve and were developed entirely by the Foursquare business development team (read – they probably charged a hefty sum for these). By adapting their business page offering, they will attract more brands to the site who will be attracted by advertising to grow their followers and reach of their communications through the social network. This is exactly what brands want through social media, which Twitter isn’t able to accommodate. While a brand can set up a profile just like anyone else, these are not distinguished as brands, with unique functionality such as the ability to contact the brand privately without the need to be followed back. While Foursquare’s offering for businesses isn’t going to directly compete with Twitter, when brands are looking to developing social media, offerings like this will always get a look in and it shows their understanding of what businesses want.

Getting advertising wrong

What’s perhaps most concerning for Twitter’s work with brands is that their single offering for this – advertising- is still a long way off. This was shown last week when the Discovery Channel brought a promoted trend on the site for #sharkweek . While this saw them appearing in the trending topics in the right hand side, the only problem was that they found themselves next to a distasteful hashtag for #reasonstobeatyourgirlfriend , which found its way into the promoted trends organically. While it might be bad enough to have your brand term appearing next to this, it was taken further when many people were tweeting to combine the 2, such as “She won’t shut up during #sharkweek!!! #Reasonstobeatyourgirlfriend.” For an advertiser in social media, this is enough to put you off for a long while, if not completely, as the brand damage is considerable. Of course, that’s a risk that you take when you open up your brand on social media, but Twitter needs to do more to protect their advertisers here, if they want repeat business.

The fact is that Twitter only has so long to really get brands on board if they want to seriously monetise the site. Of course, this doesn’t have to be the intention of every social network, but the fact that they are building out their ad products shows that they want to work with brands. If they don’t develop this offering soon, they risk getting left behind.

Now You Can Track Your Friends (Or Enemies) Deleted Tweets With Undetweetable

Niall Harbison — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 15:06:33 +0000

One of the funniest (and at times most worrying) things that can happen on Twitter is when you delete a tweet that you didn’t mean to send only for people to find it in search some time later. I’ve lost count on the amount of times I have seen this happen to somebody usually to great embarrassment or ridicule and it has to be said that is a major weak point for Twitter. Once you have deleted something on Twitter it is not actually deleted in any way at all. Smart bloggers and journalists will often screen grab a deleted tweet from finding it in search results but a new tool called undeltweetable is looking to take that a step further. Essentially what the service does is create an index of deleted tweets and allow you to browse through them. You can add anybody to the database by adding their username (it won’t look back retrospectively though) and forever more that person will have their deleted tweets tracked by the system.

Undeltweetable lets you search through user tweets that have been deleted

Service Might Not Be Around For Long

If you feel like using this site you might want to move pretty quickly because there is already talk of the site being taken down. Twitter have apparently sent a cease and desist letter because the site breaks their terms and conditions and you could see why they would be keen to do that. The fact that you have never been able to properly delete tweets is a flaw in their service and this site has managed to highlight that in a fairly simple way. So if you don’t want people finding your drunken or dodgy tweets then you best protect your tweets or just not send anything bad because all sorts of people could be watching!

When is a fan not a fan? When you have to pay for them.

Lauren Fisher — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 17:16:23 +0000

There has been some discussion online today around the fact that Republican President candidate Newt Gingrich has been accused of paying for his followers on Twitter, from a combination of being ‘followed’ by fake accounts, as well as being followed by a group of people who simply follow others as part of a system. While this is not being confirmed by Gingrich, it brings up an interesting question in the race for Likes and followers, of when a fan is actually a fan, and when they’re just a number contributing to a larger total. It will potentially force many brands to reassess their social media strategy and just how worth it is it to ‘buy’ fans.

You shouldn’t have to pay for friends

A tried and tested method on Facebook is to run ads directing to your Page, to build up your Likes. This is nothing other than buying Likes, yet it doesn’t seem to draw anywhere near the same controversy as basically doing the same on Twitter. Essentially, you are paying for people to like you (both figuratively and literally), so can you really call them a fan at all? While they may well turn into loyal followers of your Page after starting by clicking on an ad, these fans will always be different to the ones that found you organically – that joined your Page because they had a genuine interest in your brand or because their friends Like your page.

If you stood in a bar giving out money for people to have a free drink with you, you could hardly count these people as friends. The chances are they’re probably sticking around for more free drinks. This is similar to the quality of fans you might get for running a Page that is purely competition focused. They might like the chance of free stuff, a lot more than they like you. When you think about it in this way, it might be wrong to call these acquired fans – fans at all.

The value of a fan

The question that regularly does the rounds has popped up again, and is being explored by comScore in their ‘Power of Like‘ report. The report, which was released to announce their new comScore social media measurement tool, looks at how much a Like is worth to a brand. Rather than looking at it in terms of media value, propensity to purchase etc.. they answer this question by looking at the number of friends someone has. The more friends you have, the more value you provide to a brand as when you take actions on the Page, these will be ‘broadcast’ to a larger number of people. They also look at the value in presence in a newsfeed as opposed to the fanpage :

The findings are interesting and take a different approach to measuring brand value than we’ve seen before. It also forces brands to look more at how their fans are engaging beyond the initial Like, in order to really determine the value they’re bringing. Of course, many brands will be resistant to this, as the number of ‘Likes’ has been the primary factor of success for so many brand fan pages.

Beyond looking at the value of a ‘Like’ it’s also necessary to look at the value of a follower on Twitter. Here, the same thinking applies of looking at the number of followers they have themselves, to determine the value they’re bringing. You also have other unique metrics that apply to Twitter, as communities are more public, so you can look at the number of retweets you’re getting instantly, or the number of retweets a particular follower is getting, to see how influential they are within their own community. But all of this only applies to all your fans/followers up to a point. It’s becoming necessary to look at how the paid vs organic followers and fans are giving you value. If a fan is worth investing in, how are they interacting with you that justifiies this spend? At the moment this is largely an unknown for many brands, as it’s difficult to split down your Page by those fans that found you naturally and those that you paid for.

We need to understand now

As Twitter introduces promoted tweets into the newstream, it’s important for brands and marketers to understand this now. Given that you now have the option with Twitter to pay to reach your own consumers, we need to understand whether there is actually value in this. While you could view a Twitter or Facebook ad as a necessary way to reach those genuinely interested consumers in a crowded space, you can also view as buying a certain type of fan. I.e. those that aren’t really fans at all. Until we develop a clear understanding of how these two different fan types are driving value, we risk buying numbers for the sake of it. Much more advanced analytics are needed within the social platforms themselves in order to be able to determine this than is currently available and many brands are flying blind. The cynics might suggest that it is within these social network’s own interest to keep this information private for fear of brands pulling ad spend if the results are less than satisfactory, but that’s not for me to say…

Numbers =success (for some)

Gingrich has brought this obsession with numbers and followers to the forefront and in doing so, regardless of whether his were ‘gamed’ or not, has raised a valuable question for brands. If you purely want to show people that you are popular by being able to reference a number on your account, then in many ways it is worth the investment that brands make, whether through transparent means such as Facebook ads or through the more dark art of gaming your Twitter account. Regardless of what these fans actually do, for many brands and individuals, numbers = success because they need to be seen to be popular and followed. This is a shortsighted approach of course, but for many this is the extend of the social media strategy, with little thought on how social platforms can actually be used to achieve something good. There is clear difference here between a number and a fan, follower or a friend that a staggeringly large amount of people still don’t understand. A number is not necessarily a fan, though they may be so in name and the long-term implication of this misunderstanding are yet to be seen, as social media for brands is still so new.

Focus on relevant competition and trends with analytical tool Twittie

Quinton O'Reilly — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 11:00:12 +0000

The growth of Twitter and social media in general has made the need to measure and analyse accounts and their progress even greater for businesses. There are many analytical tools out there, like Optify and CoTweet, which aim to help businesses drive more traffic and leads but the number of analytical tools are as many as they are varied.

Twittie differentiates itself from the other analytical services by focusing on the location for its users, allowing them to keep up to date with new trends as well as their clients and competition.

The service, which will launch at the beginning of this month, analyses the results and development of your twitter account by tracking your followers, monitoring reactions to your tweets, links and tags and checks your influence in relation to your competitors.

The service also offers suggestions based on this to help tailor your tweets towards your target market and make them more effective. The site gathers data about when your followers are online so that you will know the best times to tweet at the best time, resulting in greater engagement with your followers.

Those interested in the service can avail of an interactive demo which guides users through its service and features, giving them a taster of it and how it works before they sign up.

Currently the service focuses on the British and Polish market but it will be introduced to other areas such as Germany, Spain and the US in the next few months.

Hopefully when the service launches properly, the quality will be far greater than their promotional video which appears to be a text-to-speech video, although the company is Polish so perhaps it’s a little unfair to dwell on it too much.

Twitter fails to live up to advertisers’ expectations

Lauren Fisher — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 14:44:08 +0000

Much has been made of Twitter’s expanded ad offering, as they begin to introduce ads into users’ newstreams. It was an inevitable move for the site as they seek to monetise the increasing amount of content that’s shared on there. Twitter has had a chequered past with advertising however, as their offering has not been as open as Facebook’s, who provide an easily accessible platform for advertisers with budgets of any size. Quite why they haven’t got advertising right isn’t really clear, as there are some obvious tactics they can use such as maximising search results with an Adwords style platform. A recent report suggests that their advertising options may be in danger, as they invest more in monetisation.

Advertisers disappointed

Findings published in emarketer look at how Twitter is performing against advertiser’s expectations. While 31% of respondents rated Facebook’s advertising as excellent, this compares to just 11% for Twitter, even though it is the number 2 social network of choice for advertising :

What this suggests is that while there is a high level of interest in Twitter for advertising, the experience is not living up to expectations. Once the initial shine has worn off of using Twitter as an ad platform, the experience and results don’t seem to be leaving advertisers satisfied. While Twitter’s new products could change this, the results are concerning for Twitter and shows that despite investing time and money in ads, they’re still not working for the site.

The main worry here of course, is that Twitter begin to develop a bad reputation among advertisers, and experience poor performance in return business to the site. While at the moment Twitter advertising is still a novelty for the majority of brands, due to Twitter’s closed network of advertisers ( you have to be manually approved as an advertiser by a Twitter sales rep), this is yet to be proven as sustainable. Of course, what remains to be seen, is whether performance of ads in Twitter work to entirely different metrics than you experience in Facebook for example. While ads for Facebook Pages or sponsored stories are the best ad products in Facebook, there is an easy way to measure this performance, through increase in activity on your Facebook Page. With Twitter, ads don’t necessarily work by growing your followers, it is much more of a branding exercise. So advertisers may be disappointed that they don’t see an increase in numbers, but this could suggest that a different approach and understanding is needed for measuring ads on Twitter. They need to move quickly to prove the value in their offering, if their ad product is to succeed as they want it to.

How To Get Your Own Verified Twitter Account For Just €12.50

Niall Harbison — Sun, 31 Jul 2011 08:45:13 +0000

A verified Twitter account can be seen as the ultimate status symbol as they are reserved for celebrities, sports stars, politicians and other well known public figures. That little blue tick symbol is impossible to obtain for the general public and is the only way to distinguish between somebody of real importance and all the spam and parody accounts on Twitter. There is however a way that you can get you hands on the ultimate online status symbol in the form of a small cute badge that you can order for only €12.50 online. The badge itself is very small and beautifully designed but what I love behind this is the subtle humor that only people with a good knowledge of Twitter and the online world will really get. The badges are very stylish though and although 99% of us will never get our hands on a real verified Twitter account we can all go and order one now and make ourselves feel important in the real world.

Who Owns A Journalist’s Twitter Account? BBC Loses 60,000 Followers To ITV

Niall Harbison — Sat, 30 Jul 2011 11:00:06 +0000

To Succeed at media these days you have to build personal brand via social media. It is all part of the job. Many journalists and broadcasters leverage the traditional publications and news channels they work for to help build that brand and amass Twitter followers and the smart employers allow them to do so. They share their Twitter name on air, encourage users to ask them questions via that medium and it all helps grow audience online that can feed back in to the traditional media. That is all well and good when the journalist or broadcaster stays with the one media organization but a new case has shown the tensions that could emerge when employees move between different news organizations…

Laura Kuenssberg, who was the BBC’s chief political correspondent has just been poached by ITV a rival broadcaster. She had built up a large following of over 60,000 followers over the last couple of years working for the BBC and her Twitter account was called BBCLauraK but as soon as she joined ITV that was quickly changed as you can see below…

Laura Kuenssberg's Twitter account was quickly changes to an ITV branded account

Who Owns The Twitter Account?

The way things are set up at the moment she was perfectly in her right to change the name because it was her own personal account. It wasn’t written in to her contract that the account was in anyway linked to the BBC or that they controlled it. From the BBC’s perspective they have lost a journalist overnight to a rival and as if that wasn’t bad enough she has taken an audience of 60,000 people that could be pushed towards her new shows on ITV even though all the hard work building those numbers was done via the BBC. This case will act as a wake up call for the whole profession and you will see more official Twitter accounts being put in place and lines getting added to contracts defining who owns what.

Journalists Are Brands

There is a move away from all the power sitting with big publications and media organizations towards journalists having their own personal brands. The FT reports that ITV said that the account was a small “additional benefit” to hiring Mrs Kuenssberg but I would say that is glossing over the truth. I would say one of the main reasons they hired her was her large online following and if that was not reflected in her salary package I would be stunned. Journalists are now commodities and the more personal brand they have the more they will get paid. Simple as that.

Ten unique examples of twitter brand campaigns

Quinton O'Reilly — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 16:56:08 +0000

With the number of people reached social media sites increasing, brands and companies are learning how to create campaigns that use the platform effectively. While sites like Facebook can utilitize the visual, advertising on Twitter is a greater challenge due to its limited space of 140 characters.

While there is the option of promoted tweets and users, not all can or want to go down this route. Yet the prospect of reaching out to 200 million users means that it’s becoming a more focused area for advertising.

Therefore the examples below are just some of the unique ways businesses and products have enhanced their product or service through Twitter. One of the constants that each campaign on offer has is that they interact and engage with users and is one of the reasons behind their success.

USA Today

Campaign: #AmericaWants

To measure the support for American charities, USA today ran the #AmericaWants campaign which lasted for four days. The campaign required users to tweet their favourite charity with the hashtag; the charity with the most tweets and retweets would receive a full page, colour advert in USA Today.

More than 60,000 tweets were made in support of more than 500 different organisations with the campaign reaching an estimated 67 million users on Twitter. People joined twitter just to partake in the campaign and many celebrities tweeted in support of their favourite charities. The charity that won the full page advert was ‘To Write Love on Her Arms,’ an anti-depression non-profit organization.

Bonafont

Campaign: Tweeting fridge
In Brazil, people don’t drink the recommended daily amount of water and Bonafont needed a way to get that message across. So they created the Tweeting Fridge, a fridge that tweets every time it’s opened or if the user doesn’t open it for a while where it then reminds them to drink.

How they ensured this was to give the fridge to a new celebrity every month (those who have a high number of followers) every month where they then use the regularly stocked fridge. Each fridge tweet contains a link to a website highlighting the importance of staying hydrated.

Uniqlo

Campaign: Twitter line & Virtual line campaign
Instead of just advertising their products and deals on twitter, Japanese clothes retailer, Uniqlo found a unique way of getting British shoppers familiar with their brand. Displaying ten items from their online store for a promotion called ‘lucky counter’, they held a sale with a difference where the more tweets an item received, the lower its eventual price was. The campaign was a success where some items ended up having 60% taken off their original price.

The clothing company held other campaigns such as a ‘virtual line’ campaign where every to celebrate its 26th birthday, every 26th person to join the campaign would receive a voucher worth around €10. 15,000 twitter users joined the first day before increasing to 60,000 by the second day, growing further until the four days were up. The campaign was held in China and Taiwan where the latter country’s virtual line ended up with 640,000 users by the end.

Mercedez Benz

Campaign: Tweet race

A race with a difference. After selecting four people from a selection of 2,000 entrants, they embarked from different locations in Mercedez Benz vehicles which were powered by tweets. Every four tweets would allow their car to travel one mile which was being tracked in real-time. Over 27,000 people participated while the campaign received over 500 million impressions on twitter.

KLM

Campaign: Surprise gift

The airline, KLM, decided to give some of their customers a surprise before their flight. By getting their staff to browse Twitter and Foursquare, they found people who mentioned they were flying with KLM. Then using info they provided on social media sites, the flight attendants purchased an appropriate gift and presented it to the passenger when they arrived at the airport.

Around 40 customers were given gifts which ranged from being upgraded to first class seating on both flights, guidebooks, watches and muscle ointment and bandages for one man who was travelling to Mexico to build houses for the homeless

Don’t tell Ashton (Kutcher)

Campaign: Exactly what it sounds like

The only campaign on this list that isn’t promoting a brand or product, this campaign is the idea of Swedish artist Jon Holm who decided to create live artwork made up solely of user’s profile pictures.

The size of each picture is proportionate to how many followers you have so the more you have the bigger your profile picture is. The hook of the campaign is a joke not to tell one of the most popular twitter users around, Aston Kutcher, as his follower count is so large it would take up the entire frame and block everyone else. They’ve already presented the finished product to Kutcher but the campaign still lives on.

Edge Shave Gel

Campign: Anti-irritation

Similar to KLM’s campaign, Edge ddi the same for its anti-irritation campaign except they gave gifts to people who were experiencing certain problems. From people using the #soirritating hashtag, Edge carried out random acts of kindness such as giving out iPads, computers, megaphones, cereal and a Spanish/English dictionary to a woman who tweeted that there were voices in her head speaking Spanish.

Orange

Campign: #WinterWarmer

Wanting to cheer up people in Britain, mobile phone company Orange decided to run a #Winterwarmer campaign in London, Birmingham, Manchester and Brighton where they delivered scarves and huge hot chocolates to people who friends tweeted their username with the hashtag. The Orange vans then tracked down the details of each person’s location and stopped by to hand them out their gifts.

True Blood HBO

Campaign: Season three promotion

To promote their third season of the successful vampire comedy drama, the show’s marketing team launched a digital media campaign centred on ‘The True Blood Ultimate Fan Experience’ with particular focus on Twitter. Holding midnight screenings in 50 different cities simutaneously, they used the site to share clues for which city would get tickets next. The screening included an early viewing of the season 2 finale, a sneak peak of season 3 and a live simulcast Q&A session with the creator, Alan Ball, and the cast.

The show’s blog, Bloodcopy.com, became a Twitter microsite which among other campaigns such as ‘Ultimate Truebie Sheriffs’ where fans tweeted why they should be the sheriff in their city to win tickets. To top it off, the show invited two of their actors to host a live Twitter chat at Bloodcopy.com on the night of the finale.

Bon Me Food Truck

Campaign: Improving the business

Twitter campaigns don’t have to be large scale as the examples above, sometimes to be unique, just being attentive and engaging can gives you the desired effect. Bon Me, a small Vietnamese food truck company in Boston, alerted followers through twitter about where it was going to be located, engaged with customers and posted updates to their menus.

By engaging with their customers, users wanted to know where they were serving next and even suggesting where they’d like for the truck to go next or what menu items they’d like to see. Simple but sweet.

Agency Launches Their Own Twitter Marketing Campaign With #TweetSweets

Niall Harbison — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 16:03:21 +0000

We love seeing examples of agencies who do their own marketing in a creative way and get the word out about themselves in a way that will appeal to their clients. Brando (another Irish agency yay!!) are doing that today with a creative campaign that basically sees them eating as many sweets as they possibly can directed by a creative Twitter campaign. It’s called #Tweetsweets and you can see their campaign website here. The idea is that anybody on Twitter can write to them and ask them to eat sweets and if things keep up at the current rate they are all going to be seriously sick and high on sugar.

Interactive Sweety Fun

You can follow all the action over here and it allows users to tweet out their requests, there are leader boards for both followers and the staff themselves and the interaction can also be viewed via a live video stream. This isn’t a complicated concept to set up but it does show real imagination and a great fun use of Twitter rather than brands who just try to hijack hashtags for competitions or to promote themselves. This is fun, interactive and quirky.

Everybody Is A Winner

I was actually alerted to the campaign when I got sent a little cute box of sweets myself this morning in the post which instantly put a smile on my face. Who doesn’t like getting sweets!! The team at Brando are winning because they get to eat sweets all day and have interaction with the public in a way that working for clients never provides and the general public have a fun little interactive to break up their day as they force people to eat sweets online.

I love seeing agencies running campaigns like this rather than taking out large corporate sponsorships or direct marketing because this shows an agency off in the best possible light doing what they do best. There is no doubt this will bring in new business because clients will want a bit of that creativity for themselves and it won’t have cost half as much as other big agencies use to market themselves. Well done to the guys in Brando for putting a smile on people’s faces for a couple of hours. We are all off to build the Simply Zesty “TweetBeer” campaign website. Best kept for a Friday evening.

The secret to Twitter success – it’s all about sharing links

Lauren Fisher — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 07:52:27 +0000

Brands’ approach to Twitter is in many ways more of an unknown than in Facebook. With the way that Facebook Pages have developed, there is a very clear structure to how you run your business presence on Facebook. There is a place for your photos, video, wall updates, then tabs on the side to do pretty much whatever you want with and a clear distinction between friends and Likes. With Twitter, it’s not so straightforward. Sure, everyone has the same basic tool to use, with 140 character messages, but there’s little direction for brands – do you post news, facilitate customer service, are you meant to @reply people who don’t follow you, how do you grow followers, when should DM and not @reply? It causes many problems for brands, who open up a Twitter account, only to leave it to die a slow death as they realise they’re not really sure how to use it for their brand or what value it can drive. A few interesting studies have been published lately that all seem to point to the same conclusion – the secret to Twitter success is driving links.

If Charlie Sheen can do it….

Perhaps one of the most unlikely sources for analysing Twitter success for brands, comes via Charlie Sheen. Showing just how much your Twitter followers can be worth. Last week he sent a tweet that contained a link to a tool developed by The Next Web -Twittercounter. Through their analytics, they were able to track that the tweet brought in 23,754 page views over a 24 hour period. That equates to a 0.5% click through rate. While to some that may seem like a low figure, I’d consider that to actually be very impressive. When you consider the way in which Twitter works and how easy it is to miss people’s updates if you don’t see them straight away, 0.5% is a good click through rate, especially for a free bit of marketing.

What this shows, is that people are actually clicking on links within Twitter, which is a good starting place to look at how a good Twitter strategy can work for brands, and the importance of sharing links. In the case of Charlie Sheen’s tweet, the tweet itself wasn’t necessarily particularly engaging – how many people are really interested in the ins and outs of his own Twitter stats? So what this showed is that without even working hard on making the tweet engaging and enticing people to click through, they’re still clicking. This of course works well in the case of celebrities, who can then put a pretty nice sum on the value of their tweets and product placement through links (though not in this particular case).

Twitter drives 4 times more traffic than you think

What brands need to consider of course, is how much of this link sharing is occurring purely within Twitter, versus how much traffic it’s actually driving to your site. The tracking platform Awe.sm have just released some findings that show just how much referral traffic Twitter can deliver. The answer is that Twitter is driving four times more traffic than you might think it is. The study is particularly interesting as it calls into question other findings, that look to Twitter as a poor traffic driver, and looks beyond the basic referral traffic approach. They can more effectively follow the journey of links throughout the internet, attributing the original traffic source no matter what other platforms a link has been shared through. What they found was that just 24.4% of links shared on Twitter, actually had Twitter listed as the traffic referrer, meaning that 75% of Twitter referral traffic is largely going unaccounted for.

Further to this, they found that just over 62% of links that were clicked on Twitter, weren’t showing up in analytics as having a referrer at all – therefore they were just showing up as direct traffic. This can be largely attributed to the fact that so much Twitter activity occurs via mobile, which many analytics packages mark as direct traffic as it didn’t occur directly within a browser. These findings from awe.sm actually lift the lid on Twitter analytics and just how well links function within tweets. Taking this approach, if we increase Charlie Sheen’s to 2%, assuming that 75% is largely unaccounted for, it becomes wholly more impressive.

Twitter as a news platform

The way that Twitter is evolving, means it is becoming increasingly a space to share content and receive information, as opposed to a more direct platform such as Facebook, where you might just converse with friends. When we go into our Twitter stream, what we want is information and news, and we get that by streamlining the people we follow to get relevant information, mostly contained within links. Twitter is developing much more as its own news platform, competing with traditional publishers in this respect. Herein lies the biggest opportunity for brands. Instead of looking at Twitter as the place where you just try and converse with people and make friends, consider what you can give them that is going to allow them to get more out of their Twitter experience. Tweeting links to relevant articles and other content will allow people to attribute a value to you – as an important news or information source.

In 2010, when 90 million tweets were being sent per day, Evan Williams revealed that 25% of these tweets contained links. This is an incredibly high proportion of tweets being sent that contain links to external sites and it shows the importance of links to the Twitter ecosystem. Links are what we want to share on Twitter and they’re what we want to discover as well. Brands should be taking advantage of this and include it as a vital part in their Twitter marketing strategy. Of course behind this lies a complete content strategy that needs to be considered. Sharing links to interesting things online is one thing, but you’re only going to start seeing real value if this interesting content is actually on your own website and is being produced by you. Original content is what people want most of all.

Content is the third most important on Twitter

To confirm the idea that what people want is interesting content on Twitter, an infographic released by Get Satisfaction provides an interesting perspective. Looking at why people follow brands on Twitter, compared to Facebook/Myspace, the results may surprise you :

Looking at the figures above shows us two things. Firstly, interesting/entertaining content is the third most important factor when following a brand, coming after special offers or deals and being a current customer, at a very high 22.7%. Secondly, it also shows that interesting content is more important to people on Twitter than Facebook, as on Facebook, this comes in at 18.2%. This shows the importance for brands of developing a separate strategy on Twitter that is weighted more towards providing interesting content through links, as opposed to purely offering discounts or promotions, which would be more of a standard practice on Facebook.

When developing your Twitter strategy the important thing is to keep trying new approaches to see what works best for you. Maybe you get a better click through rate when sending through one link each day that summarises your content, video links might not work as well, pure news links might engage people more etc.. The value you get out of your Twitter account will largely depend on the analysis behind it. One thing is certain – links is what people want and what brands can provide.

Top 10 most tweeted about events ever (so far)

Quinton O'Reilly — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 15:45:11 +0000

Japan may have become the first Asian team to win the Women’s World Cup but that wasn’t the only achievement yesterday.

During the final, over 7,000 tweets per second (TPS) were posted on the site commenting on the game worldwide making it the most tweeted about event on Twitter at any specific time so far.

With over 200 million users and 350 billion tweets posted on the site daily, the potential for the world to comment and discuss current events separately or together is growing and moments like this are increasing.

So, since Twitter has recently celebrated its fifth anniversary, here are some of the most tweeted about and significant events to occur during Twitter’s lifetime so far.

(10) Michael Jackson’s death

Date: 25th June, 2009
TPS: 456

Having originally set the record for most TPS back in 2009, comparing it to the other entries on this list will only show how explosive Twitter growth has been since then. At the time, over 12 million tweets were being sent per day during July 2009 and while there would be many moments that would boast a greater number of TPS than this, this was the first significant event for users to tweet about it in mass.

(9) NBA finals – Los Angeles Lakers Vs Boston Celtics

Date: 17th June 2010
TPS: 3,085

The final game of a best-of-seven series, the LA Lakers won the 2010 NBA championship by beating the Boston Celtics 83-70 and winning the series 4-3 overall. Going behind 40-34 at halftime, the Lakers levelled the game at 64 with six minutes remaining in the fourth quarter before. The title was their fifth in eleven seasons and their sixteenth overall.

(8) World Cup 2010 – Japan Vs Denmark

Date: 24th June 2010
TPS: 3,283

Shortly after the LA Lakers won their championship title, their record was broken again by the World Cup, Amazingly, the topic wasn’t about complaints about the vuvuzelas constantly droning throughout each game but instead focused on Japan’s final group game against Denmark. Japan only needed a draw to progress to the knockout stages while Denmark needed to win.

The end result was Japan sweeping Denmark aside in a 3-1 win, allowing them to finish second in their group and progress to the second round. The final came closest in matching this record with 3,051 TPS, sparked by Spain’s winning goal.

Also the video allows you the opportunity to relive memories of that game, and featuring the familiar sound of vuvuzelas in case you missed them.

(7) Osama Bin Laden’s death

Date: 2nd May 2011
TPS: 3,440

It’s only been two months ago since the leader of al-Qaida and the world’s most sought after terrorist after being responsible for 9/11 was killed by a US operation. The news was greeted with joy by most Americans yet further twitter activity came from FOX news which reported that ‘Obama Bin Laden’ was killed, not noticing their mistake until much later. Their website didn’t fare much better, having spelt Osama ‘Usama’ for a brief period.

(6) The Royal Wedding

Date: 29th April 2011
TPS: 3,966

In front of 1,900 guests in Westminster Abbey, Prince William and the now Duchess of Cambridge, Kate Middleton, exchanged vows to complete one of the most covered media events so far this year. In Britain alone, over 24 million watched the ceremony alongside an international audience in the hundreds of millions.

(5) Super Bowl – Pittsburgh Steelers Vs Green Bay Packers

Date: 6th February 2011
TPS: 4,064

An audience of 111 million watched The Green Bay Packers defeat The Pittsburgh Steelers 31-25 in a packed Cowboys Stadium in Texas. The event was so that twitter decided to release a graph detailing the periods of mass tweeting, showing that tweeting peaked when the game ended.

Interestingly, the peak number before that was during the half time show when Usher started performing; feel free to draw your own conclusions.

(4) Japanese earthquake

Date: 11th March 2011
TPS: 5,530

Not all reasons for becoming a most trended event are positive with Japan being hit by an earthquake measuring 8.9 on the Richter scale, the sixth largest earthquake ever recorded. The earthquake caused mass power outages, fires and a tsunami which left many areas in Japan without power or, for a lot of coastal areas, completely devastated from the tsunami.

Almost immediately, millions of good will messages, reports, prayers were tweeted during the disaster becoming the first stop for reporting and distributing information to those in the affected areas.

(3) New Year’s Day 2011

Date: 1st January 2011
TPS: 6,939

Just four seconds after midnight in Japan, New Year’s Day was celebrated by breaking the record for the most number of Tweets sent per second.

Thanks to a 127 million population, the Japanese mobile networks tend to crash under the strain of people wishing friends and family “Akemashite omedetou gozaimasu” (Happy New Year). Twitter was used as a way of avoiding this problem and getting the message across which subsequently lead to a massive increase of tweets.

The video below shows the activity on twitter occurring during New Year’s Day starting with Japan before moving across to Europe and finishing at America

(2) Copa America 2011 – Paraguay Vs Brazil

Date: 17th July 2011
TPS: 7,166

Just narrowly missing out on the top spot was the Copa América quarter-final clash which saw Paraguay defeat Brazil 2-0 in penalties. After a goalless match, Brazil missed all four of their penalties while Paraguay only needed to convert two of their three attempts to book their place in Wednesday’s semi-final against Venezuela.

(1) Women’s World Cup Final 2011

Date: 17th July 2011
TPS: 7,196

Twitter announced yesterday that over 7,196 tweets were sent (TPS) per second during the final which saw Japan defeat USA 3-2 in penalties in a thrilling final.

USA were the first to go ahead after Alex Morgan scored in the 69th minute before to bring the game to extra time. USA took the lead again in the 104th minute yet three minutes USA missed their first three attempts where Japan sealed the title after Saki Kumagai slotted her penalty past the USA goalkeeper, Hope Solo.

Unsurprisingly, it was Japan that mostly contributed towards breaking this record.

No, introducing ads will not be Twitter’s downfall

Lauren Fisher — Sat, 16 Jul 2011 09:43:55 +0000

There has been much discussion over the past week, as Twitter look set to introduce a self-service ad platform, which will see a new set of Twitter ads enter into the Twitter stream. While many are viewing this as a purely strategic move by Twitter to increase their valuation, or indeed prove their current market valuation, many are taking the view that Twitter is ultimately making the wrong decision here. An excellent article on Twitter’s ad plans on Gigaom cites a post on Forrester by George Colony, where he laments the introduction of more ads. Evidently he, and many others, see this as Twitter’s ‘bad idea’, viewing the introduction of more ads as an unwanted intrusion into the conversation on Twitter and completely the wrong way for them to monetise. I don’t see this as Twitter’s big ‘bad idea’ – rather they are introducing a model that advertisers clearly want and which will likely be executed in such a way as to be respectful of the way Twitter works.

Ads are okay if we want things for free

The fact is that if we want a service for free, we know that advertising will have to come into play at some point. Up until now we have enjoyed a Twitter experience that has been virtually ad-free, and it’s been great. But if we want to keep enjoying Twitter at all, then there will have to be a compromise made between Twitter and its users. The uncomfortable truth is that if Twitter were to develop an ad product that would be so unobtrusive to the ‘conversation’ on Twitter that we don’t even notice it, advertisers wouldn’t be too happy and poor ad return would make the model unsustainable. Therefore Twitter needs to introduce an ad format, fast, that catches people’s attention. And if this means we see an advertised tweet in our stream, maybe we will have to accept that if we want the service to continue.

The biggest risk Twitter is taking here obviously, is that it could annoy its users at a time where there is fresh competition on the market in the shape of Google +. But to look at it purely in that way ignores the (in)valuable ecosystems people have built up on Twitter, the reliance many of us have on the site in our day to day lives and the pure value it continues to drive. Ads will not undo all this hard work. Rather, we will find a way to adapt, maybe filter out the ads from the main stream of the conversation and if it’s done well, maybe even click on a few because what we’re seeing is relevant content.

If Facebook can do it…

What seems odd about the backlash to Twitter’s decision to introduce ads in this way, is that it was sort of inevitable this was coming. In-stream ads are the most obvious way for Twitter to monetise the content that people are generating. Facebook has been doing this for years, finding increasingly new ways to make money off the back of content that’s generated through their site, even making these appear more like organic activity through the likes of sponsored stories. Facebook do this, and people keep on coming. The first reaction to a change like this will be negative and it may seem uncomfortable at first, but the level of hype around Twitter’s decision seems somewhat incongruous with the simplicity of the fact. Like any other social network, they’re providing a platform for people to create content. And just like Facebook, they need to find a way to make money off of that (harsh as it may sound) in order to survive.

The dinner party problem

One very valid point raised by George Colony in his article, is in the analogy between comparing Twitter’s proposed ads to a dinner party where an uninvited guest barges in to try selling to you. The beauty of Twitter is the biggest problem here – it’s pretty much always been about one main section of the site where updates filter into. The sidebar has become more cluttered in recent months, but this one wall is their single most valuable asset on the site. If they want to offer a viable option to advertisers, ads in this stream is pretty much the only place that’s going to drive revenue, barring a radical overhaul of the site. It means that you can’t get away from this uncomfortable dinner party problem. Do we really want an ad right there in the middle of our own conversation?

The first thing Twitter has to get right here is the way that ads look. One thing Facebook consistently gets right is that their ads look like ads and are nearly always in the same place in the site. If Twitter start ‘tricking’ users by placing ads in the tweetstream that look organic, people are going to feel cheated and even more intruded upon.

The second thing they have to get right of course, is the way in which the ads are served. Compare your dinner party intruder to a door to door salesman and it’s not too comforting to think that’s what your stream could soon resemble. But think of him as someone that is able to sit at the table and strike up a funny conversation as he tells you about what he’s selling, and you could start to see the appeal more. If Twitter maintain control over the process of approval for ads and limit how often they are shown, they can make these in-stream ads fit more with the conversation on Twitter. This will be ultimately more beneficial to both the user and the advertiser and shows the unique approach Twitter has to take here. If they’re making ads a direct part of the conversation, they need to educate brands into how they should start that conversation.

Ultimately, these new ads will not be Twitter’s downfall, provided of course they served in the right way. It has been their most obvious way to run ads and it seems they’ve put it off for as long as is possible. Quite what the reaction will be, is determined largely by what might seem like the minutiae – such as how the ads look or how the disclaimers they might carry. Twitter will survive this, and probably be a lot richer because of it.