3 Awesome Examples of Twitter Marketing
The last two posts in our series have illustrated what a powerful venue Twitter advertising can be. It’s an excellent way to engage your audience online, and gain greater influence by increasing the amount of Twitter followers for your business. It’s also incredibly easy to generate targeted marketing campaigns. However, one thing we haven’t covered is what a successful Twitter marketing campaign looks like in practice.
Today we’ll be discussing some famous examples of companies with wildly successful Twitter advertising campaigns. Ones that put together interesting and creative content that's easily distributed to their mass of Twitter followers. In so doing, they accomplished several important goals. They built brand awareness, consumer loyalty, and most importantly they produced higher profits.
Taco Bell
One thing Taco Bell does well, (aside from making food that somehow becomes tastier, the later at night it’s consumed) is advertise. Even going back to the 90’s, they had a highly memorable campaign featuring a Spanish speaking Chihuahua. These days the commercials are still funny, but the real story is their customer interaction.
Taco Bell uses humor and speedy reaction time to build up their online presence and popularity. There are entire websites dedicated to recording Taco Bell’s interactions with its Twitter followers. This is obviously a good thing for building buzz around the brand. Taco Bell exemplifies a few of the concepts we’ve discussed in the past two posts. One is effective Twitter targeting.
The Mexican food magnate spends a great deal of time searching for popular hashtags. Once they’ve picked up on a popular message they start riding its coattails into further prominence. On the surface this is a risky proposition, as most companies that tried to keep in touch with trending hashtags would probably be poorly received.
What separates Taco Bell’s social media network strategy from the rest, is its popularity among youth and the effective use of humorous content in its advertising.
Using humor is a powerful tool on its own, but Taco Bell doesn’t stop there. There are a few examples in which they promote exclusive content, and engage other gigantic brand names with their Twitter account, like this special offer for adding them on Snapchat:
Or a quick conversation with carbonated drink giant, Pepsi:
This is an example of lending a helping hand, and dually promoting both brands. It's one aspect of social media marking we've discussed in our previous posts that Taco Bell excels at. Here we have one brand reaching out to another, and both of them reap the benefits of increased awareness.
Though this next example isn’t exclusive to Twitter, it does show how offering free content can build brand loyalty. Providing a fan of your food with a customized speedo takes true dedication, and really illustrates to the public at large that this company cares about its customers.
Taco Bell doesn’t have a monopoly on humorous social media presences though. There are a couple more examples of deft handling of a Twitter advertising account.
Skittles
As if anyone needed another reason to buy Skittles. The Mars candy corporation’s rainbow colored standout utilizes offbeat humor and massive consumer interactivity to achieve their brand awareness goals. Their off-the-wall comments and strange demeanor may not universally cater to everyone’s sense of humor, but it’s hard to argue with the results they’ve gotten. The Skittles account has over 100 thousand Twitter followers.
That’s a lot of contacts, and plenty of loyal customers. With an impulse buy brand name like Skittles, about the highest measure of your success is how many people are talking about you at any given point. Skittles consistent interaction with its consumers ensures that the level of engagement stays very high. That means there's a large portion of the populace with Skittles on their minds, and that section is that much more likely to grab a bag on their way out of the grocery store.
Part of this success is from bringing the funny, but that’s only a part of the greater whole that Skittles really nailed. They found their own unique brand voice. They set a goal of figuring out what you would expect to hear from a rainbow flavored candy, and bringing it to you in all of its abstract glory.
Because of this sedated distinctiveness, Skittles is able to bring a level of authenticity to its customer interactions, one that translates into genuine affection for the brand name itself. For whatever reason, people respond to the quirkiness that Skittles puts out.
To see a clever illustration of how their offbeat attitude generates interactivity, check out their newest "Smash the Rainbow" campaign: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywTgLeb4458
Speaking of quirky…
Old Spice
Old Spice takes quirkiness to a whole new level with some of its psychotically wacky advertisements. The Best of Terry Crews Old Spice commercials video compilation on Youtube, for example, has over a million hits. The brand features hilarious and dysfunctional advertisements, designed to appeal to an over the top sense of masculinity, and it doesn’t do a shabby job.
One thing that Old Spice has in common with Taco Bell is there excellent use of Twitter to build awareness, with consistent and humorous messages. The two of them have even teamed up for a bit of comedically combative back and forth.
However, where Old Spice has been truly revolutionary is getting their Twitter followers engaged with their content. This is made abundantly clear by the personalized video responses they’ve been sending to people who've tweeted them.
Take a look: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ive3vXv-XRk
The above example is a personalized response to popular blogger, Perez Hilton, sent by the Old Spice Twitter team. This was brilliant on a couple of levels. One, because Perez has a ton of Twitter followers, and he promptly retweeted the message. Two, becuase how exciting is it that you might get a video response from a highly popular and instantly recognizable television character? Customer engagement rose to viral levels almost instantly.
This brings up another good point, if you can get a celebrity endorsement, that's a lot of free Twitter advertising. So try to connect with a wide array of people, you never know who might be interested in your service.
This particular campaign boosted Old Spice buzz into the stratosphere. The videos totaled close to 6 million views, with over 22,500 different comments. As far as consumer engagement goes, it doesn’t get much better than that.
As these three companies show, there are plenty of different ways to successfully build your brand using social media networks. Humorous, helpful, and interactive content are all powerful methods to do just that, and these household names all illustrate that perfectly with their Twitter marketing efforts.
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