Twitter Campaign Learning’s

We have been running a campaign on Twitter for the last couple of months for a client of ours. While I cannot go into specifics about the campaign, I can share some of our learning’s:

Build Credibility
There is nothing worse than a Twitter account that only tweets sales offers. Unless your name is Dell you cannot build a following that way.
What we have found is that the Twitter account has to tweet useful information. To do this we set up accounts on a program called EasyTweets. EasyTweets allows us to add some RSS feeds to our Twitter account. These RSS feeds pull in news from the niches that we are targeting. So anyone who follows our account, will get news that they are interested in.

What does that look like?
Well if I was a restaurant in Nashua NH, I would add RSS feeds of Nashua news to my feed as may target audience is people who live in, and around, Nashua.
What we found was that if we added local and industry news to our Twitter feeds, we were able to increase the number of followers that we had. And since the feeds we added were of interest to our target audience, we were able to add followers who were interested in what we were selling.

Don’t Oversell
We have found that if for our client that the optimal number of “sales tweets” was one to two a day. And since the Twitter accounts were sending out 10-15 tweets a day from the RSS feeds, our “sales tweets” blended into the overall stream and did not look like all we were doing is selling on Twitter.

Test Content
Just like testing Ad copy for PPC, test and retest your sales tweet content. It is amazing what a difference changing one word can do for your CTR. Also, test the time of day of your offers. Do they convert better in the morning or afternoon?

Use Hashtags
Hashtags (#mets for example) is an massively underused Twitter feature. There are a lot of portal type web sites now that run continuous twitter steams. For example Metsblog.com is aimed at New York Mets fans and averages 2.5 million page views every month in traffic, and is read by roughly 35,000 unique people every day. Metsblog.com has a twitter feed page on its site that pulls in Tweets that use the tag #mets.
So if your target audience is Mets fans, and you use the #mets tag in your tweets, then suddenly your tweet is getting exposed to 35,000 mets fans. Multiple that by the hundreds of Mets web sites that are online and suddenly your reach is much greater than the 1,000 followers that you have. Your tweets are now being seen and read by tens of thousands of people.

source: http://social-media-optimization.com/2010/07/twitter-campaign-learning%E2%80%99s/