Using Twitter to increase brand awareness on Valentine’s Day.

By Paul Doherty Ecommerce Comments Off on Using Twitter to increase brand awareness on Valentine’s Day.

valentines-day-twitter

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With over 232 million active monthly users, Twitter is arguably one of the most important brand awareness platforms available. Every second, on average, around 6,000 tweets are tweeted on Twitter. That’s an enormous potential reach, and also a great deal of competition for attention.

By now your Valentine’s Day sales campaigns should be in full swing, for most ecommerce retailers last orders for delivery on Saturday will be tomorrow meaning you have 24 hours for a final big sales push. After that, the work doesn’t stop there! Valentine’s Day is a huge opportunity to create and strengthen relationships with your audience through great content.

ValentinesDay-Twitter-1024x281

Here’s how:

1. The Humble Hashtag

Your followers may be interested in what you have to say, and so may a huge proportion of the other Twitter users that don’t even know you exist. Here’s where the hashtag comes in handy! Quite simply, to open up your tweets to a wider audience use relevant, popular hashtags. Data from Topsy reveals the hashtag #valentinesday was used over 69,000 times yesterday alone, and the hashtag, popularity continues to grow the closer to Saturday we get.

Not sure which hashtags to use? Hashtagify has a useful tool that presents correlations between hashtags.

Here’s an example:

hashtags data by hashtagify.me


2. Only Useful Content

It is extremely tempting to create mountains and mountains of content in order to gain brand exposure over Valentine’s Day. If we could offer any advice it’s this:

People are busy buying presents, booking restaurants and planning their days. At such a busy time of year people want short, useful content that they can digest in a matter of minutes on the way to work or whilst in the Starbucks queue. Don’t overload your users with too much information.

Some examples of great, useful Valentine’s Day content include:

  • Top 5 date activity ideas
  • What to wear for your Valentine’s Day date
  • 3 movies to watch this Valentines
  • What to write in a Valentine’s Day card
  • Post these blogs on your ecommerce site with supporting images and share on Twitter to gain exposure

Valentines-Day-Movies

 

A few more top tips:

  • Ensure the content renders perfectly on all devices
  • Compress your images so that the page loads quickly (or people will simply bounce!)
  • Never use slides for blogs – keep it all on one page
  • Don’t forget your SEO
  • Don’t be shy – ask your readers to share your content!
  • Quick, easy, useful information that your audience will thank you for (and may even retweet to show their appreciation!)

 

3. Competitions

As you’ll see from the Hashtagify diagram, competitions are extremely popular over Valentine’s Day. Right now is the perfect time to run a competition, reveal your winners on Saturday and ask them to tweet a photo of their prize! This is can give you fantastic exposure.

What you should do:

  • Start your own hashtag and ask people to enter your competition by tweeting photos, following your brand and using your hashtag
  • Retweet your competition entries
  • Offer more than one prize, the more prizes the more winners – the more winners the more tweets!
  • Always reveal the winners on Twitter. If that is the platform for your competition you can’t simply email the winners, people will be left wondering if they won. Give your brand credibility by running a trustworthy competition

Valentines-Day-Competition

What you shouldn’t do:

  • Ask  Twitter users to enter your competition on another social network
  • Disappear once the competition closes – make sure you engage with your new followers
  • Offer a prize that has nothing to do with your brand. Yes, a competition to win a holiday in Ibiza may increase your followers by 15,000 but if you sell Cycling Gear you’re not going to reach the right target audience – and those followers will disappear very quickly

 

Twitter-SaltRock

 

4. Share The Love

Lastly, and simply – retweet, favourite and reply to your Twitter followers. Why? You may not think it’s such a big deal to receive a simply ‘Nice One!’ or ‘Love this pic!’ from a brand you follow but… it is and it is probably something they will mention to their friends. Share some love, say thank you for the follow and turn your followers into brand ambassadors!

@Saltrock are great at engaging with their Twitter followers – well done guys!

 

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