Your Guide to Twitter Marketing: The World's Best Marketers Reveal Their Secrets

By Simon Owens

While there are other how-to Twitter books on the market, this one is unique because I sought out some of the world’s most powerful marketers and grilled them on their subject matter expertise. In these pages you’ll read how the head of social media advertising at global PR firm Edelman crafts his Twitter ad campaigns. You’ll see how The Atlantic magazine leverages Twitter to send millions of readers to its website. You’ll hear how a crisis PR consultant monitors Twitter to deliver real-time intelligence and response during a brand calamity. This book gives you direct insight into how the world’s top marketers approach Twitter and use it to drive sales and influence.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Simon Owens
• Release date: Mar 16, 2015

Simon Owens

Simon Owens is a longtime journalist, marketer, and PR professional. He began his career as a newspaper reporter covering local government in Virginia. In 2008, he moved to Washington, DC to work at a marketing agency while simultaneously serving as an associate editor at PBS’ MediaShift. He has conducted PR, content marketing, and social media strategy for dozens of companies, organizations, and individuals, including Google, Comcast, Forbes, ESPN, C-SPAN, and Nike. For two years he was an assistant managing editor at US News & World Report where he built out the company’s then-nascent social media presence. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Forbes, New York Magazine, Scientific American, Harvard’s Nieman Lab, The Next Web, Daily Dot, PBS.org, and US News & World Report.

Book preview

Introduction: Why Should You Market on Twitter?

If there was any doubt as to whether Twitter is the real-time pulse of what’s occurring in the world, that doubt was decimated on February 19, 2009. On that day, US Airways Flight 1549 took off from LaGuardia Airport a little after 3 p.m., and, a mere three minutes into its flight, experienced engine failure as a result of an impact with Canadian geese. Because of the heroic efforts of pilot Chesley B. Sully Sullenberger (and probably a hell of a lot of luck), the plane landed in the Hudson River and all 150 passengers survived.

The crash landing and subsequent evacuation would quickly become international news, but unlike most other global news events prior to it, people didn’t first hear of it on television news or any major media outlets. Four minutes after the crash, a Twitter user named Jim Hanrahan tweeted I just watched a plane crash into the hudson rive in manhattan [sic]. And then the world was regaled when Jānis Krūms uploaded a photo of the plane floating in the Hudson while passengers were evacuated.

The event was a watershed moment for Twitter, one that branded the social media platform as the go-to place for breaking news and commentary. The network would go on to play a central role in some of the world’s most monumental events, everything from the Arab Spring to the protests in Ferguson. It also became a watercooler hangout where major live events could be discussed and dissected in real time, whether it was the presidential debates in 2012 or the Super Bowl.

But users don’t only access Twitter to read the news. At any given moment, millions of people are using the platform to discuss their everyday lives. Many of those discussions center on consumer products, entertainment, and business needs, topics into which every single brand wants to insert its own messaging. Twitter has especially high adoption among millennials, a key demographic brand advertisers are having a difficult time reaching. 

By now, there’s ample evidence that Twitter drives real brand awareness and engagement. Several case studies have shown how it can even drive sales. A study conducted by Datalogix in 2013 found that users who engaged with a brand’s Promoted Tweets purchased more from that brand than a statistically identical control group, resulting in an 12 percent average sales lift. Those who came across organic tweets from the brand were 8 percent more likely to purchase from it. The men’s clothing brand Bonobos ran a Twitter-exclusive, 24-hour sale and sold out most of its inventory, mainly to first-time buyers. A 2014 Nielsen study found that 56% of Twitter mobile users say they are influenced by content on Twitter when they are buying a product or service. Marketing analytics company MarketShare conducted a study showing that, in the previous year, Twitter had driven $716 million in automotive sales, and that luxury compact autos generated $17.80 in revenue for every $1 invested, while volume midsize cars generated $7.90 for each $1 invested.

Twitter isn’t just a vehicle for driving sales; it’s also commonly used to conduct market research, field customer service complaints, and even as a form of crisis communications. It used to be that if you were having problems with your cable then you had to call and wait on hold until someone could assist you. These days, you just tweet about it, and within minutes someone from @comcastcares is asking for your contact information so he or she can dispatch someone to help you immediately. And the more followers you have, the quicker the service.

It becomes especially important to monitor and respond on Twitter whenever your brand faces a crisis, because it’s usually the first medium people turn to to both learn about a crisis and pile on with criticism. The oil company BP learned this the hard way during the gulf oil spill in 2010. Someone created a parody Twitter account, called @BPGlobalPR, that constantly mocked the company’s botched public relations response to the crisis. The account became a global sensation and was widely covered in the media, and BP was completely blindsided by the ordeal. Sometimes the crisis originates on Twitter, as we saw when a social media staffer accidentally tweeted out I find it ironic that Detroit is known as the #motorcity and yet no one here knows how to fucking drive from what he thought was his personal account but was really the main Twitter profile for Chrysler. No matter how quickly you delete a tweet, given the quick metabolism of the Twitter community it’ll likely be screenshot and propagated long after the original tweet has disappeared.

What you’ll get from this book

Given all this, it’s not difficult to see why Twitter is imperative for not only marketing your company or organization, but also your personal brand. Industry leaders are expected to demonstrate their expertise on the microblogging platform, and it plays a central role for networking, gathering information, and marketing your products and services. But while the largest corporations can afford top marketing firms with ample experience on Twitter, there are 27.9 million businesses in the U.S., nearly all of which require some sort of marketing but don’t have the money to hire a full-time communications staff. There are also 199 million working-age adults, many of whom are now expected to promote their personal brands on social media.

While there are other how-to Twitter books on the market, this one is unique because I sought out some of the world’s most powerful marketers and grilled them on their subject matter expertise. In these pages you’ll read how the head of social media advertising at global PR firm Edelman crafts his Twitter ad campaigns. You’ll see how The Atlantic magazine leverages Twitter to send millions of readers to its website. You’ll hear how a crisis PR consultant monitors Twitter to deliver real-time intelligence and response during a brand calamity. This book gives you direct insight into how the world’s top marketers approach Twitter and use it to drive sales and influence.

What you won’t get from this book

This book isn’t Twitter 101. And by that I mean if you’ve never opened an account and actually used the platform, then many of the insights found in the subsequent chapters will be lost to you. That’s not to say that getting caught up to speed so you can benefit from this book will be difficult. Twitter, though at first intimidating, is actually a pretty simple platform (after all, how complicated can a tool that only allows 140 characters be?). I would suggest opening your own account and spending some time on Twitter. Get to know how it works and its internal lingo (retweet, hashtag, etc.). Follow some people you admire and see how they use it. If you absolutely don’t know where to start, then I’ve included some links to some Twitter 101 articles at the end of this chapter to help you. In fact, in each chapter where we discuss techniques that might need more explanation, I’ll provide further reading