Successful Twitter Campaigns Build Brands, Bolster Profits
Posted: October 05, 2009
Image courtesy of Twitter
By John Greaves
Social networking sites are returning commerce to the days when business and personal relationships were intertwined through constant non-commercial contact. Twitter is an especially effective medium that successful companies are using to position customers and companies in the same digital media community. “We use Twitter because it helps us to humanize our brand,” says Carisa Miklusak, senior consultant for Personified, a Careerbuilder firm.
New York-based Liberty Jet Management Corporation has seen business explode in the two weeks since it began promoting charters on Twitter. “We made $7,500 in two weeks on charter flights,” says co-owner Christian Deputy. “Making $7,500 in two weeks may not be a lot of money to some, but to me making that in two weeks says we’re on to something and it’s due to Twitter.” With no ad agency or in-house marketing department, Deputy says he gets more than 30 followers daily and his clientele now includes actress Kirstie Alley and pro-golfer John Daly. Deputy posts real-time price updates and flight availability.
Other businesses value Twitter for the quick response time it allows. “We’ve been in business for 30 years,” says Robert Haufler, director of marketing for New York-based Somerset Mortgage Lenders. “We tweet stuff to real estate agents, we post up-to-the-minute interest rates, we can bring up to 10,000 hits per day to our home page based upon our SEO.”
Kogi BBQ a Korean Taco Truck business in Los Angeles, Calif., has been profiled by Bon Appetit magazine as “being true innovators as grassroots guerrilla restaurateurs.” The mobile restaurant uses Twitter to update menus with available foods and locations. Tweets back and forth between Kogi BBQ and followers include invitations to specific neighborhoods, comments on individual dishes and apologies when the food truck is falling behind.
Once companies are comfortable using Twitter as a customer service platform, the next step is often active marketing of their brand. Jones Soda’s asked individuals making road trips to send photos with the hashtag #roadtripjones to Twitter, Flickr, Facebook or YouTube. In exchange they were entered to win a chance to have their road trip photos on labels of Jones Cane Sugar bottles. The grand prize was a $500 shopping spree with Griffin Technology makers of the iTrip line of iPhone accessories, the other partner in the campaign. “Throughout the course of the campaign we conservatively estimated Jones received over 5 million impressions via Twitter alone,” says Alex Hillinger of the social networking site, Good Chemistry, who helped launch the campaign.
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