By now, hopefully you have read some of our stories highlighting the successes of brands using Twitter as a vital tool in their social media marketing campaigns.
These stories highlight how the success was achieved, but it is also highly important to learn what lessons some of the larger corporations have taken from their Twitter successes. We can learn from the successes and the failures without having to experience the lows for ourselves.
@TacoBell Takes a Ribbing and Keeps on Ticking (or Tweeting)
Being a global brand, it is obvious that Taco Bell has its fans, and its fair share of detractors. This means that while they enjoy responding to their fans, they also have no issue responding to those who may not have positive comments or even those with simply curious ones.
The Lesson: Do not take yourself or your brand too seriously on Twitter. As long as you are accelerating the positive, embracing the negative will have a beneficial impact as well.
@DeltaAssist is Always Listening
Delta has promised that their Assist account will be listening around the clock, seven days per week. Listening isn’t really all there is to it. They are also responding to their customers complaints or questions, whenever and wherever they come from.
The Lesson: If your products or services are used outside regular business hours for your location, they are in the active business hours of other locations. Make sure you can be responsive whenever your customers need it, even if their location and business hours are not in your preferred time slot.
@CharlotteRusse Has it Going On
Charlotte Russe keeps it going on too. They not only send direct messages to new followers, often with exclusive offers, but they also regularly give away items, create discount offers, and run contest with valuable prizes from their Twitter account.
The Lesson: No one can resist a great deal. People will buy items exorbitantly discounted, sometimes even if they don’t need them. Also, consumers love contests and of course, the outright giveaway approach. Get attention for your brand or get off Twitter.
@JetBlue Goes Humble
Although they have many who tweet on their account, JetBlue encourages each of their Twitter management staff to integrate their own personalities into their Tweets and respond to customer complaints and request for assistance with a dose of reality and as much help and understand as possible.
JetBlue’s reps understand that many issues and delays relating to air travel can be a time for incredible stress for some passengers. To combat that, they encourage their staff to supply plenty of heartfelt ‘We are sorry!”‘s when needed.
The Lesson: Along with allowing your staff to showcase the people behind the accounts, you should never be afraid to apologize. Offering incentives for business mistakes or red tape are also great ideas too!
In many earlier DBMEi posts, we highlighted some of the businesses that were enacting full-on ‘listening’ skills into their social media campaigns. In such a short time, there are already many more, large and small who have followed suit. Each and every one of those has a lesson they have learned. Reach out and ask them yourself. When I did,
I received a response in six minutes. Personally, if I was flying JetBlue today, I would be pretty satisfied with a six minute response time, with a real person, instead of a conversation with a long series of different voice prompts or immense button mashing required.
Sources:
Proven Successful Twitter Campaigns
Hi Joy,
Always good to read something from you. Twitter is indeed an important social media tool. I have to admit, it is the one I use the least. But since Basil said he is a twitterholic, I figure I would pay more attention to it. I like the idea of tweeting 120 instead of 140 characters to leave room to retweet as Basil pointed out (I can’t remember if that was in a talk or a video). Anyway, take care and hope to see you soon.