At Effective Marketing we are Twitter fans.
We have been using Twitter marketing for around four years and have attracted more than 66,000 followers and make sure that we post around 5 times per day. Challenged on the business benefits of Twitter however and we might struggle a little.
We get the benefit of listening in to conversations and have struck up conversations and relationships with people all over the world, which has been lovely.
The biggest benefit that we have derived from Twitter is the average thousand visitors that it sends to our website every month. We attach around five thousand pounds of value to that as when we run Pay Per Click campaigns a click will cost us around five pounds. Of course we know that there is a difference between these visitors and those who are proactively searching for the products and services we provide, but this base calculation keeps us happy that Twitter is a worthwhile investment.
But, when people approach us who are in a hurry to win new business it isn’t in the top ten list of recommendations.
Which is why I was delighted yesterday to see Twitter working at its very best for a friend of mine, @PhilLucas.
Phil is a stand up comedian plying his trade in Brighton and running with his intriguing, silly, funny projects on Twitter. Yesterday things went a little bit mental for Phil. A year ago he created some silly newsagents ads – one of them offering a trade of pictures that he had taken from his TV for £75 or a similar collection of Deborah Meaden pictures.
Which looks like this:
Yesterday Twitter woke up to this silliness as it came to the attention of influencers including @TheJeremyVine, @LouisTheroux and @DeborahMeaden
herself. This attention led to a piece in The Evening Standard which looked like this:
And today there has been a mention on Radio 2 and, perhaps most importantly the Effective Marketing blog.
So, there are lessons to be learned here. The first is the durability of content, remember this content is a year old. The second lesson is the strength of really interesting content, it is the quirkiness of the content that has caught the imagination here. The third lesson is the power of influencers, if you can get the attention of people with large engaged audiences things can get very exciting very quickly. The last lesson is about perseverance – Phil has produced tonnes of this stuff and I can only imagine how Twitter will react when it wakes up to his views on Foxes.
This then is a great demonstration of how effective Twitter can be if you have the right content, the right connections and the creativity to catch peoples imaginations. I don’t know if we can attach a pounds and pence value to Phil’s success yesterday and I am not sure if that is his intention, but I know you can’t buy a mention on Radio 2 and this will do his comedy career no harm at all.
The challenges for businesses is to come up with something as successful.
