Twitter difficult channel to control

Twitter, despite a lot of media buzz, is a difficult tool to utilize successfully to increase brand awareness and mindshare. Twitter is a social network that is all about a conversational stream. Marketers want to be part of the conversational stream and people and companies are searching for ways to successfully implement Twitter into their marketing plans. However, it is proving difficult to control and is much more luck than anything else.

Using Twitter as a tool to increase brand awareness and mindshare is a challenge for several reasons. First people are naturally resistant to being marketed too. People have trained their minds to recognize and tune out advertising and marketing messages. So if people resist your messages and you continue to push them out you actually are counter-productive and creating negative brand associations in their minds.

Add to the challenge that Twitter monitors the communication streams and they are very sensitive to their network being used for marketing purposes. They don’t like it and they try to prevent it. For example Twitter recently intervened in the middle of a successful marketing campaign that was organized by Moonfruit, a U.K.-based company that offers website building tools. They orchestrated a Twitter sweepstakes, giving away 10 MacBook Pro computers to Twitter users that included the #moonfruit tag in their Tweets. The campaign was so successful that #moonfruit was Twitter’s top trending topic and represented 2.5% of all Twitter traffic. So where is the problem with such a successful campaign? Twitter didn’t like it and booted it off their top trends list for no reason effectively stopping the momentum the marketers had started.

The lesson in this is that marketers need to realize that the messages they are creating are considered invasive by some and media pollution by others. They need to be sympathetic to this view point and find creative ways to be noticed without creating negative feelings. Twitter should continue to be considered as a viable marketing channel but marketers need to realize it is very tricky and difficult to control. Additionally, marketers run the risk of actually creating negative reactions to the products and companies they are trying to promote.

For more information read: “Twitter Campaigns: A Cautionary Tale for Marketers” by Elena Malykhina at: http://www.brandweek.com/bw/content_display/news-and-features/digital/e3i607dcf03868690e210321228d58f5709?imw=Y