Sunday, May 10, 2009

Direct Marketing Campaigns To Recruit Customers With Twitter

Tracy Cote explains on the DM News website how a direct marketing agency can use Twitter as an recruiting tool. A lot of marketing professionals are seeking for ways to leverage Twitter to generate business. Even myself has discussed a lot about the topic for the past year. Hence I have explained how Twitter could be used to address coupons and promotions.

How To Use Twitter As A Recruiting Tool
This article aims to define some rules for direct marketing agencies to use Twitter as a new medium for recruiting. Here are the steps of the article:
  1. Obvisouly, create a Twitter account for the company
  2. Master the art of Twitter, meaning 140 characters headlines. It is tough to keep it simple, but in marketing, the simpler the better (which is actually pretty hard)
  3. Use the Twitter search capacities to find out prospects. Now that Twitter has pretty good search engine, you'll be able to target the right customers.
That remains pretty raw...

Twitter For Customer Service
This is an interesting article, because actually, I have never really considered Twitter as a recruiting tool. I see many companies which created Twitter account in order to be followed by users, to propose their services. But I am really wondering if such a technique is efficient. In my opinion, Twitter is a great way to interact with your customers, but more adapted to a loyalty program, or a retail traffic tool, more than a recruiting tool.

By that, I mean I don't see users buying from a company because of a Twitter campaign, but more people following a brand they already know and that they are probably already buyers, to get discounts or be aware of any news and events. Actually Twitter is already used by many companies as a customer service tool.

Twitter Is A New Medium
What is for sure is that Twitter, Facebook status updates, and the other kinds of micro blogging are new media that companies need to deal with, thanks to a community management strategy. What this article underline, is that as a new medium is springing up, some new ways to use it as a marketing tool will appear. Will Twitter become a direct marketing tool to recruit customers? I doubt, but the question must be asked, and probably some further research need to be established.