Tweets are the building blocks of your communications and provide the power of saying more, with less. The right content and behaviour converts people into customers, and turns customers into advocates. However, with an average of over 500 million tweets sent each day, it is increasingly difficult to set your business apart from the competition. It also comes as no surprise that this heightens during the festive season, as the sea of promotions and giveaways picks up momentum.
It may seem tempting to immediately send an influx of tweets, bombarding your consumer’s Twitter feed, so they have no choice but to witness your campaigns. But before you get carried away, take one step back, and learn. Follow and observe businesses similar to yours and learn from their success stories, learn from the nature of tweets that create the most interaction, and finally, learn from their mistakes.
This blog provides four useful tips on how to overcome this problem and increase your Christmas engagement in a simple 140 characters!
1. Find your voice
It’s vital to relay your personality through your Tweets, so all aspects of your business work together to tell a story. Due to the informal environment, users respond best to friendly and conversational tone of voice. This may seem obvious in order to create interaction, although all too often, businesses feel the need to portray a corporate appeal and are overly formal on Twitter.
The opportunity to humanize your brand is perfect for the Christmas period, as we all know that everyone is up for a bit of festive cheer! (Apart from all those Scrooges out there, of course). So, save 10 characters and add a Ho, Ho, Ho to the end of your tweet!
2. Respond, react & retweet
Your followers represent some of your most loyal, interested customers, so invest time and treat them accordingly. Reply when people tweet about you, favourite and retweet positive tweets and address any critical tweets.
It’s likely that your account will become busier over the Christmas period with seasonal marketing campaigns and increased product interest. All of these actions will help you build stronger relationships with your followers.
3. Tweet festive, shareable campaigns
People tend to retweet when they are entertained and inspired – so what better time than Christmas to create an entertaining Twitter campaign that inspires people to buy your product/service?
The characters on Twitter can be limiting so why not contain links, photos and videos to express your content in greater detail. There are endless promotions that can incorporate all these ideas, such as marketing the 12 Days of Christmas with a chance to win discounts and vouchers each day. When this is successfully achieved, your creative tweet has the potential to travel to many prospective customers.
4. Take advantage of custom timetables
Twitter has recently introduced the feature of custom timelines. Organising a timeline with theme-specific tweets to share with your followers, will give your business the innovative edge. To put a festive spin on the timeline, why not gather a collection of tweets that refer to your Christmas campaign and build even more interest by sharing it with your followers. For example, John Lewis could create a custom timeline about their 2013 Christmas advert, showcasing what people are saying using the #BearandHare
These four tips are just the beginning on how to increase engagement with your target audience over the festive period. If you would like more information on the social media services we provide at Bigwave Media please contact [email protected]