1. Brands say bae
INTIMACY AND SINCERITY ON TWITTER FOR BRANDS BIG
AND SMALL
10TH MARCH 2016
Matthew Elliott
2. 2010 – Joined Twitter in October
2013 – Graduated from Cambridge with
an MPhil in European Literature & Culture
2015 – Joined Unilever’s Future Leaders
Program
9. TWITTER IS DIFFICULT TO USE AND VERY DIFFICULT
TO UNDERSTAND
In Q3 2015, Twitter had an estimated
1.316 billion users.
Of these users, only 316 millions were
monthly active users.
And less than half of those were
active weekly.
24. CAN WE LEVERAGE THIS FOR YOUR BUSINESS?
• If your business took a selfie, what would it look like?
• Would your business be on Snapchat?
• What is your business’s favourite Snapchat filter?
• What kinds of jokes does your business laugh at?
• What kinds of events does your business react to?
• What emojis does your business use?
• Which brands does your business love?
25. CONTEST
Hit me with your best tweet
- Have a voice, be topical, be reactive.
- Remember, you are not talking to as many people as you might think
- Don’t be afraid to be clever or silly or intimate
Editor's Notes
Always be careful with your hashtags, you don’t want to make a mistake like this one.
Bae is a stand in here for every time a brand embarrasses themselves online by using slang, by pretending they’re your friend, by looking like a middle aged man who doesn’t know how to communicate.
Twitter’s user experience is all about curating your own content, not having it done for you (as on Facebook). Twitter requires way more effort, and way more conscious engagement to enjoy.
If you have a 100k twitter followers, how many of those accounts are eggs? How many are bots? How many of them are even weekly active users? If you’re lucky, you have 15k real followers who are actually seeing your tweets. And 15k is not really all that many people.
These are the last six Twitter followers for @TIGIcreatives – 15k followers, and from the most recent six.
A hair salon with two tweets
A real, active beauty blogger with a decent ratio
An egg with three tweets, and none since January
A ten follower account that only tweets inspirational messages in German
A Nicaraguan student who has tweeted once
A single mother posting pictures of dogs and children
One of these peope is a power user, half of these accounts are probably inactive, and only one is your target audience.
This is what happens when you roll out content to Twitter without thinking clearly about the platform. 55k followers, 6 interactions. Six!
Picked this one because it there are plenty of clear things wrong with it.
The context makes *no sense*. Why is the customer eating a supermarket multipack ice cream in a restaurant?
The call to action is muddled. Should I order magnum minis in restaurants? I can’t, so, what now?
This was a promoted tweet – someone paid for all six of those interactions. Six.
Hundreds of people dismissed this promoted tweet the moment they saw it. That’s not how you generate positive brand equity.
In the correct channels, this post does great (even though it’s been cropped badly). If you’re not optimising for Twitter, is there really much point in pushing the content out at all?
And someone asked about the restaurants!
On Twitter, if you’re going to reach anyone, it’s going to be Twitter Power Users
Because no-one else is there.
So the only content worth putting on Twitter is Twitter optimised.
Because the only thing you know about your audience for certain is that they really like Twitter.
But they know their audience, they’re ready to be bold and to interact, and they’re generating real engagement.
The voice is real and engaged and personal. You can recognise a speaker with a real personality behind it.
A brand that is speaking about itself should have no trouble expressing real brand love. Do you have a voice that allows you to sincerely express pride in your brand? Or do you sound pompous? Would Lucy Kellaway laugh in your face?
Is this a dialogue or a conversation? What does it have? Does it look like it would pass the Turing Test?
Your voice on social media doesn’t need to be the same voice as your core brand comms. It shouldn’t contradict it, but it can evolve it, build a brand equity of its own.
Try not to accidentally sound like a racist uncle. If your brand identity is racist uncle, that’s fine, but it’s not, is it? If you’re a the UK face of a global telephony giant headquartered in Madrid, you can’t also be a South London teenager.
This from the 2013 Superbowl when there was a power cut. Great viral marketing anticipates moments it can react to, and is able to build great organic traffic by being timely, relevant, and funny. Most importantly, it is part of a conversation, not dictating to consumers.
We’ve looked principally at niche examples here, so I want to look at a best in class example from a number of household names. This is great because it gives each brand a coherent personality, exists within a gentle but witty frame, and is willing to engage in the conversation, not create it.
This was picked up by Buzzfeed and has millions of pageviews. Think of the free exposure.
If you ask a lawyer, they will painstakingly explain to you that for complicated reasons, corporations are sometime people. If you are going to be a business on social media, you need to decide what kind of 18-35 year old with a smartphone your business is.
Finding a good social manager isn’t hard either. Find the wittiest person in your office. Find the wittiest person on Twitter who doesn’t seem to have a job.
