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Brands Connect with Twitter Moms Through Content and Value

Twitter-momsIs your brand leveraging Twitter to connect with the active community of women dubbed Twitter Moms who hold massive buying power and actively follow and engage with brands on the social web?  If you’re not, you should be.

New research from lucid marketing (via eMarketer) reveals some interesting facts about Twitter Moms’ preferences when it comes to interacting with brands on the microblogging site.

While many brands rely on self-promoting sales and discounts via Twitter, it turns out that content marketing and creating shareworthy content is just as important on Twitter as it is anywhere else on the social web.  In fact, this is something I talk about extensively in 30-Minute Social Media Marketing.

Here is what the new research tells us:

  • 71.3% of Twitter moms want to see links to interesting articles or news from businesses’ tweets.
  • 67.1% of Twitter moms want to see businesses tweet links to sales or special offers on their websites.
  • 62.6% of Twitter moms want to see links to downloadable coupons and discounts from businesses’ tweets.
  • 55.2% of Twitter moms want to see updates on new products from businesses’ tweets.
  • 52.2% of Twitter moms want to see funny tweets from businesses.

But there’s more.  What kind of content from businesses do Twitter moms share with their own connections by retweeting it?

Check out the stats from the lucid marketing study below:

  • 76.1% retweet Twitter updates from business that include links to interesting articles.
  • 66.7% retweet Twitter updates from businesses that include coupon codes or downloadable links to coupons.
  • 59.5% retweet Twitter updates from businesses that are funny.
  • 54.4% retweet Twitter updates from businesses that include a link to a sale on a business’ website.

So now you know what Twitter moms want from businesses — great content and useful links to discounts and coupons.  Next — what do they not want?  In other words, what makes Twitter moms unfollow businesses on Twitter?

Check out the stats below:

  • 67.5% unfollow businesses on Twitter that tweet about things that are not interesting to them.
  • 60.6% unfollow businesses on Twitter whose tweets have no personality.
  • 55.4% unfollow businesses on Twitter because they publish tweets too frequently.

What can we learn from these statistics?  Most importantly, your business needs to share content that adds value to people’s busy lives but don’t overwhelm them and add to the already cluttered web experience.  Instead, make your Twitter updates shine by being interesting, adding some personality (no one wants to follow a corporate machine), and knowing when enough is enough.  Once you have their attention on Twitter, don’t annoy your audience.  Instead, leave them wanting more!

Image: stock.xchng

Put Your Brand Logo Through the One Color Test

water_colorsBrand identity is an elusive subject for marketers and non-marketers alike.  One of the most important tangible representations of your brand is its logo.  These days, logos are getting more and more elaborate with half-tones, surface effects, and a myriad of design effects that look great online but can be a nightmare to reproduce offline – technically and financially.

While it’s nice to say, “logo design shouldn’t be restricted by future production budgets,” the truth of the matter is that an elaborate logo could become cost prohibitive every time you need to print it.  From brochures to business cards, billboards to coffee mugs, and everything in between, your logo needs to reproduce well in a lot of sizes and on a lot of surfaces throughout the course of its life.

As you’re developing your brand logo, you need to use the Brand Logo One Color Test to ensure the logo you create to stand for your brand promise takes more into account then how cool it looks.  While I’m not suggesting that you sacrifice “coolness” in an effort to save money, I am suggesting that you take the time to consider all applications of your logo before you commit to a design which will cost you a fortune every time you print it or a design which doesn’t translate well onto various media.  I’m continually surprised by how even large corporations roll out logos that a design agency sold them on, knowing the production issues they’re likely to face down the road could be expensive and limiting.

With that in mind, here is the Brand Logo One Color Test

Ask yourself the following questions:

  1. Will my logo still stand out from the crowd in black and white?
  2. Will my logo design force me to print it in one color because it would be cost-prohibitive to print it in full-color?

Depending on your answers to the above questions in the Brand Logo One Color Test, you might want to reconsider your logo design.  Remember, there is more to logo design and brand identity than meets the eye (sorry, I couldn’t resist the pun, but it’s very true).

Image: stock.xchng

Calculating the Value of Facebook Fans

currency-chartA recent study by Syncapse and Hotspex analyzed 20 top brands on Facebook and the activities of their Facebook fans in an effort to calculate the value of each one of those fans.  The average value of each fan is valued at $136.38 according to the study.

But you should approach that number with caution.

One of the biggest challenges for big corporations trying to implement social media marketing strategies is calculating the elusive return on investment (ROI) of those efforts.  My position on social media marketing ROI is a bit different than the traditional ROI metrics that we’ve all learned over the years as we calculate response rates, lift, and all those other easily quantifiable success metrics that have been developed over the years.

However, social media marketing is still in its infancy, and the traditional hard metrics that marketers use to justify budgets to corporate executives don’t really apply to social media marketing.  Instead, social media marketing is more closely aligned with brand building.  Both offer incredible value to an organization, but that value is difficult to measure in hard numbers.

That’s where what I call the shift from calculating Return on Investment as the form or ROI to Return on Impression as the form of ROI is necessary to evaluate social media marketing success.  You can read my complete post about the new social media marketing ROI on the Yahoo! Advertising blog, but I’ll recap the highlights here:

  • Calculating the success of social media marketing depends more on soft metrics than hard metrics.
  • Those soft metrics can be valued in two forms of impressions: eyeballs and perceptions.
  • Eyeball impressions are the quantifiable half of the impressions soft metric and refer to the number of times branded content or messages are actually viewed by the online audience.
  • Perception impressions are the immeasurable half of the impressions soft metric and refer to the added value that your branded content and messages deliver to the online audience and how that content and those messages affect their perceptions of your business, brand, and products.
  • If your social media marketing success or failure is measured solely by click-throughs or actual direct sales, then you’re heading down a path that will never allow you to fully leverage the power of the social web in generating word-of-mouth marketing, brand advocates, brand guardians, and brand loyalty.

What do you think about calculating hard metrics related to social media marketing initiatives?  Does relying on hard metrics give an accurate reflection of what’s happening or is it doing a disservice to the intrinsic value of social media conversations to rely on hard metrics alone as it does with brand valuation?  Leave a comment and share your thoughts.

Image: stock.xchng

Nielsen Charts World Cup Perceptions from 7 Countries

As the World Cup got underway, Nielsen published an interesting blog post last week that shows what people are talking about online related to the sporting event in seven different countries: the United States, the United Kingdom, South Africa, Australia, Spain, Germany, and Italy.  You can take a look at the United States and United Kingdom charts below, and follow the link to read the full article (complete with all the charts) at the NielsenWire blog).

worldcup-buzz_united_states

worldcup-buzz-uk

In the United States, two things stand out as particularly interesting from the Nielsen chart.  First, the U.S. team was not the most talked about team in the U.S., and second, the power of David Beckham continues in the U.S.  Even though he’s out of the World Cup due to an injury, people are still talking about him — a lot.

Otherwise, most conversations within each country are about the teams and players from those countries, which is not surprising.  However, it’s not the conversation topics that I found most interesting in this post from Nielsen, but rather, it was the way the charts clearly show segmented conversations based on geography.  That’s some cool data that businesses should be gathering and applying to their own brands.

Let’s face it — marketers always have to show visuals and hard numbers justifying the various initiatives they need to secure budget dollars for each year.  Wouldn’t a chart like these help executives who still don’t fully appreciate the value of online conversations about brands get a better perspective?  It’s just another tool you can put in your marketing toolbox to help build the case for social media marketing investment.

Charts like these prove that people are talking.  As marketers, our job is to find ways to leverage those conversations and keep them going.