Twitter and my brand: sell or experience?

Brand experience & Twitter

Can Twitter be used for commercial purposes? It is an question that is probably been asked to almost every marketeer on the face of this planet lately. But I don’t think this is the right question to ask (can I deserve money with Twitter by using it for my sales models?). The right question is how to implement and use Twitter for your brand experience. How to make it a part of it: How can I use Twitter within the strategic guidelines of my brand to stimulate a better brand experience?

I think that Twitter can be used and implemented very well in a branding strategy, but watch out…I also think that Twitter maybe doesn’t have a lot of potential life left and can be negative for your brand, more on that later.

Twitter was a startup to inform the world about what you are doing within a few short lines. The adaptation of Twitter under the normal folks was in the beginning not that high. But the professionals loved it and started to use it frequently. And from the moment artists and famous people started to use it Twitter became a lot more mainstream under the “normal” folks. Since then Twitter evolved into a real time social and news platform where news and other information is been broadcasting by the normal user at the moment it happens (think about the news around Michael Jackson). So Twitter does all that good with what it eventually was made for: it keeps you informed about your network and your friends what they and you are doing at this moment. So the potential of Twitter depends very on the network each user creates and followers it reaches. You can say that Twitter is very social dependable environmet and this is also where Twitter can be used best for your brand.

Let’s first start with one of the biggest mistakes your brand can make: using Twitter as a commercial platform for sales. Twitter is a social tool in a social environment. It is a naive thought to think that you can push your sales messages into Twitter and expect good revenue of it. Most of the people who want to follow you on Twitter are probably interested in your brand and it’s development and not to be pushed to buy something from you. Followers and users are searching for information, conversation and interaction with and from your brand. A brand who doesn’t understand that will create a negative emotion and experience as being not genuine to the cause of it followers on Twitter.

Top brands followers

A brand who does understand this can see it’s followers grow and maybe change into brand advocates. This way the reach of your brand will grow with the power of Twitter. This is actually a very easy thing to do as the followers are already willing to receive messages from your brand. One way to do this is to be informative by broadcasting first hand information through Twitter. Your followers can enjoy the privilege of following your brand.They can even get the feeling of being some kind of a VIP. The messages can be different in their purpose. For example you can get personal with replies, social by anticipating in conversations, inspirational by sharing thoughts about new ideas and experiments or even getting followers more involved with your brand by providing them your problems.

A nice example of Twitter being used as informative with first hand information to it’s followers is Bakertweet. The BakerTweet is a Wi-Fi connected box designed to be mounted on the wall of your local bakery. The baker pre-configures it with every item on the menu. Later, when something is about to come out of the oven, the baker chooses that item from the list and presses a button. All Twitter followers of that bakery get a tweet alerting them to the fresh goods. The video illustrates how it works:

I think it is a great invention that can be used (if applicable) to give followers a first rang seat to your new (fresh) products. Twitter is in this way implemented as a service for customers who love your brand and want to get your products when they’re fresh out the oven.Your brand is getting experienced as a smart one who understands that it’s customers want to be able to time their trips to pick up fresh products from the shelves.

Another way is to user Twitter as a real-time service/communication tool and offer this to the customers. Like an ordering service, room service or even a complaint service where you can react directly to the complaints. A good commercial implementation will be implemented at the Townhouse Hotel Maastricht in the Netherlands. Guests at the hotel won’t have to leave their Twitter stream if they’re feeling hungry, they can just tweet their requests to the front desk @townhousehotels.

Twitter Hotel?

Townhouse Hotels tries to make the life of their customers as easy and fun as possible. Just tweet it and Townhouse will serve it! If you look deeper you will see a branding concept that tries to understand, anticipate and serve traditional-customer-needs in a changing world. By doing this the Hotels gets experienced as a loving and caring brand that want to help it customers. It becomes a love brand that will gather quite a lot of followers who are willing to be informed with new Tweets from the Hotel and eventually turning them also into brand advocates.

These were just two examples of a lot of more possibilities to implement Twitter the right way into your brand experience. No matter what strategy you choose or how you implement Twitter it always comes down to this: Don’t try to push, don’t try to do marketing and don’t try to think you know it all because you don’t. Instead try to broadcast information, start a conversation and be interested in the power of your crowd. And one more thing…if you start to be informational, sharing and interested then you will have to keep using this strategy in every level and communication aspect of your brand without any compromises.

I noticed that Twitter is lately transforming into a platform/environment where a growing number of brands are just tweeting about their products and offers that you should buy. I think it is a trend that will grow further on as a lot of brands don’t understand the purpose of Twitter: Getting socially informative. On the long haul this can result into a lot less active user and so also a lot less relevant activity. On the other hand, the user still decides which channels to follow so it can protect itself to the commercial tweets…the downside to this is that a brand won’t always get the chance to use the full potential of Twitter as the users won’t follow any brand anymore.