Brand Strategy Key Findings: April 2013
Big Brand Twitter Data Finds Gold-Nugget Insights for Business
While Twitter is the fastest growing social network — up 40% in the last half of 2012, many businesses are still struggling to figure out how to build awareness, get more effective engagement with followers and generate leads using this tool. A recent study by Buddy Media of user engagement data from the Twitter posts of more than 320 of the world’s largest brands, found a number of gold-nugget insights into which tactics are bearing fruit. Here are some highlights of the findings. Ninety-two percent of interaction with a brand’s tweets are through clicking links. And tweets with image links have twice the engagement rates as tweets without images. The brands that posted with two or less hashtags received twice the amount of engagement as those without hashtags. Interaction with brands on Twitter is higher (30%) from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m., and tweets containing less than 100 characters get more (85%) engagement than longer tweets. More than three quarters of the engagement with a brand is through retweets. So, ask for the “Retweet” (get 12 times the retweets), but spell it out in lieu of abbreviating it and your retweet rate will be 23 times higher. “Each business and brand on Twitter has a unique voice and audience,” says Daniel Zeevi, social media scientist, “keep testing and refining your methods and strategy to determine what works best. (socialmediatoday.com)
Bullets
- U.S. consumers rate 61% of brands “okay” to “very poor” in terms of customer experience they provide. (Forrester Research; 617-613-5730)
- Nearly all shoppers (95%) have bought private-label products in the past year. More than half say they’ve increased their use of private-label products in categories such as dairy products, household paper goods, frozen vegetables, dry foods and bottled water. (icn.net)
- Eight in 10 U.S. consumers (80%) feel very strongly that making a purchase does not give the company permission to market to them via email. (RegReady; 301-990-9668)
- Four in 10 online shoppers (40%) make more purchases from companies that personalize the shopping experience across all channels than from those that don’t. (MyBuys 650-544-2400)
- Almost a third of Americans (32%) are unaware that companies “listen in” on social media conversations. (NetBase; 650-810-2100)