Brent Herd, Director of Southeast U.S. at Twitter, gave a keynote address at Digital Summit Phoenix Tuesday afternoon, with an awesome, multimedia-enriched presentation. Herd used video and photo examples from movies, television, and real-life events to illustrate the power of Twitter and how brands can use their platform to their advantage.
Twitter has a vast, international reach that produces 1 billion tweets from its users every two days. The insurmountable power that Twitter has shown over the past few years has been due to this core principle: planning for the moment.
Being immediate is what makes Twitter relevant and awesome, and it is the average, every-day type of user that holds this power. Live-tweeting has literally become a “thing” in our society – individuals attend an event or watch a television show and essentially live-tweet (or give play-by-plays) of their opinions on the event. This new method of showcasing your thoughts has brought about countless popular tweets from everyone from Ellen Degeneres to Barack Obama.
But how can a brand, or small business for that matter, utilize the same power as someone who already has a huge following like the leading lady of daytime television and the POTUS? Easy. You have to remember that we are the ones that hold the information and that live moments only happen once, so take advantage of them.
Brands such as Starbucks and Lowe’s have already utilized the power of Twitter with each launching their own hashtag and video campaigns respectively to raise awareness of their brand. Their campaigns have been deemed successful because they built their campaigns around live, immediate moments that everyone is talking about. Herd expressed, “brands are jumping in on the hot topics of conversation” and re-wording or shaping the message to best fit their brand’s vision, while staying true to the original content.
Herd stated that brand favorability increases when they engage with their audience on Twitter. Engaging your target audience is easier said than done of course, but staying true to original and meaningful content is what makes customers keep coming back. In short, utilize the power of Twitter by planning for the moment.
Follow Brent @brentherd