It should come as no surprise that I am a proponent of using Twitter for marketing. There’s no shortage of posts written about the subject, both on this blog and on others. We’ve covered Twitter ads, social listening, and even using lists for various purposes.
Today, I’m going to help you out by giving you evidence to support the conclusion that Twitter is good for marketing. Don’t just take my word for it; look at what other people have done, and the success they’ve found. If these don’t convince you, nothing will.
1. Heinz
Heinz is well known for being a ketchup brand, but they recently chose to expand into other condiments, notably including mayonnaise. They created a combination of the two, the simply named mayochup, and marketed it on Twitter.
Using Twitter, Heinz promoted both their mayo and the combination condiment, and through monitoring engagement, they were able to encourage people to be excited about the product.
This alone isn’t the most impressive, but what is impressive is that in the span of 48 hours, Heinz accrued over 2.4 billion impressions on their content. If you didn’t know about it before, you pretty definitely knew about it afterwards. That’s one hell of an awareness campaign.
2. Wendy’s
Wendy’s is a globally recognized brand, and they were one of the pioneers of highly visible corporate memery. We’ve joked a lot about corporations being people, and Wendy’s has taken it to the next level, interacting with fans, detractors, and other brands in an often humorous and sassy way. Other brands have since tried to replicate their success, to mixed results. Being a pioneer has some benefits after all.
With this specific case study, Wendy’s put forth a March Madness bracket builder. They put together an engine for creating your own predictions bracket using a chatbot, built on the Twitter business messaging platform. The bot asked guided questions to put together a bracket based on user choices. Once the bracket was complete, it was hosted and shared publicly, and users could even create a “consolation prize” bracket if their original bracket failed.
The chatbot ended up sending over two million DMs throughout the course of the event, with a 30% rate of users returning to follow the progress of their brackets and make new ones. Overall, they ended up with eight million impressions organically and even more paid.
3. 20th Century Fox
Big-budget media productions lead to big-budget marketing campaigns. Fox is no stranger to releasing huge productions, and in the lead-up to Alien: Covenant, they wanted to make sure the movie got as great a chance at success as it possibly could. As part of their broad-spectrum marketing campaign, they took to Twitter.
For five days prior to the release of the movie, Fox created promoted trends that pushed specific hashtags for their campaigns. They got custom emojis for the event and got users sharing both the tags and the emojis. A five-day promoted trend is one hell of an expense, so did it work out for them?
Twitter measures elements like awareness and recall on a point scale, and both went up after the campaign. A seven point increase in awareness is nothing to sneeze at, and a three point increase in ticket purchase intent is pretty good. Over 250 million impressions in under a week is also a pretty good outcome. It’s certainly nothing to complain about, right?
4. Target
The Great Red Giant of moderately upscale retail marketing isn’t above using social media for marketing. They partnered with Nielsen Brand Effect to study the effects of a promotional campaign on user engagement. Throughout the campaign, Target made a concerted effort to engage with users who mentioned them, using a combination of social listening and mentions to find opportunities. They took care to write clever, benign tweets to encourage fun interactions.
One of the primary benefits of using Twitter for this kind of marketing is the ability to reach people who aren’t necessarily shopping frequently. Promoted tweets can encourage users to remember Target exists and to use them for their purchasing needs. After all, when you’re deciding what store to stop at when two are (often) right next to each other, you’re generally more likely to choose the one you’ve had positive interactions with in the past.
Measuring metrics both before and after the campaign, Twitter and Nielsen found that customers are almost 70% more likely to shop with brands that are interacting with them on Twitter. Users were roughly 58% more loyal to target – the methodology for measuring this is in the case study – and 62% more likely to choose target for a service than before the campaign. If you could boost your customer purchase intent by 50% or more, would you?
5. Oreo
Oreo is fairly well known for their clever riffs on current events on Twitter. One of the most prominent early examples came during the blackout during Superbowl XLVII, where they created a short video of their cookies in the dark, from event to tweet in a matter of minutes. The ads were a huge success, and Oreo has not stopped riffing on current events in the years since.
In this instance, Oreo was promoting a new cookie-candy hybrid, their chocolate candy bars. They wanted to promote the launch, and the Oscars were coming up, so they set about planning their campaign. Twitter was working with IMDb to host a viewing party, and Oreo sponsored it. Before the stream – and occasionally during it – Oreo would play a 30-second teaser with Oscar-themed advertising for their candy, along with a custom hashtag to help promote it.
The Oscars are horrendously popular and, as a primary sponsor of a large event, Oreo gathered a lot of visibility. They racked up nearly 40 million impressions with a unique reach of 11 million people in that one night, with 2.4 million people watching the stream through a feed that was tagged with the Oreo hashtag.
6. Bahia Principe
You may not have heard of this brand the way you’ve heard of the others on this list thus far, especially if you’re not a frequent international traveler. Bahia Principe is a hotel chain that currently operates 26 different hotels and resorts, largely in international areas, including Spain, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, and Jamaica.
Just before the peak season for vacation travel, the hotel chain decided they wanted to make one final push for awareness and conversions. They created a two-phase campaign. The first pushed a bunch of different pieces of content relating to their services, segmenting their audience into groups like Foodies, adults seeking romantic adventures, parents, and those who simply love travel. With targeted tweets and clever gifs, the company reached out to each of those groups.
The second phase took the audience of people who interacted with the first phase’s tweets and tailored more content to them, this time with more focus on advertising. The result was a 44x boost to traffic, 317 sign-ups, and an average cost per action of 23 Euros. It’s a reasonably good cost for the niche, and a decently sizable audience of new conversions that wouldn’t have come in if not for Twitter.
7. Dots
Big corporate brands aren’t the only ones able to benefit from Twitter marketing. Dots is a game developed by Patrick Moburg and Paul Murphy, a clever puzzle game with a unique twist. Among other perks, the app was designed with a Twitter-based leaderboard system, where users were encouraged to tweet their scores and compete with friends on the social network.
Integration with Twitter caused a huge amount of growth as people wondered what the score meant and sought out the app to try it themselves. Competition breeds further competition, and eventually the game – and its sequel – won awards like the Webby Award and reached #1 in the app stores. 30 million players is really good given how packed and competitive mobile gaming is as a niche.
It’s worth noting that in addition to paid tweets and organic viral shares, Dots’ founders focused on customer service through Twitter. Apps are invariably buggy and can cause all sorts of problems, so being able to reach the developers directly and get your problems solved quickly is a great boon to any game.
8. BillBachao
Who? If you’re not a resident of India, you may not have heard of this company before. BillBachao helps folks investigate mobile plans and identify the best plan to suit their needs. This kind of company needs reliable data to match people to the best plans, to keep up a high enough success rate that they’re recommended through word of mouth.
The BillBachao campaign focuses on getting new users to download their app, through viral sharing, promoted tweets, and audience engagement. With a tech-savvy audience of young millennials and students in India, they couldn’t afford to fake it until they made it.
Through clever use of engagement-building tweets, both organic and promoted, a concerted app install campaign resulted in a 56% increase in installs. The results speak for themselves, right?
9. eBags
Brands both large and small can find success through Twitter marketing. You don’t need to have a budget in the millions for promoted trends or billions of impressions, you just need a sizable percentage increase on what you already have.
The eBags company is a retailer for bags, suitcases, and other travel accessories. They focus on promoting the idea of wanderlust and the glory of travel, while minimizing the impact of packing materials dragging down a good vacation.
The Twitter strategy eBags employed as to create dynamic ads across both mobile and web platforms, serving ads relating to products recently viewed by the target audience. Remarketing has always been a good, successful technique, and they put it to work for them.
The results? In this case, eBags managed to get a 23% higher clickthrough rate for their product-focused promoted tweets, with a 17% lower cost per conversion than when they started.
10. St-Germain
There’s more to Twitter marketing than just promoted tweets, and St-Germain took full advantage of it. The company is a liqueur brand, and they partnered with a creative agency called Possible to create a campaign to inspire the average user to drink. Okay, that sounded a little bad, but you know, advertising alcohol is a tricky business. It’s an industry with a bunch of additional regulations and laws surrounding it, and it’s tricky enough to pass social stigma to succeed.
In this case, St-Germain took advantage of Periscope, Twitter’s livestreaming service. Through choreography and careful creative direction, they created livestreams that reflected the vintage French aesthetic of the beverage brand. The videos combined a sort of candid look into private lives, a glamour enhanced by the beverage brand, and a spontaneity we all yearn for in our lives.
While it’s admittedly difficult to invest so heavily in a creative endeavor with no guarantee of success, when you have the budge to do it, it can bring about wondering results. Promoted tweet engagement rates jumped up 26% through the course of the campaign, with the associated jumps in conversions as you might expect.
Conclusion
Twitter marketing is broadly available, even if some forms require a bit more investment than others. I don’t imagine most of the people reading this will ever buy a promoted trend, but promoted tweets with clever copy, good timing, and plenty of responsive engagement from the brand itself can have incredible results. Social media is social at its core, and Twitter makes it easy to leverage that social interaction into tangible results.
