How to Launch Twitter Campaign to Promote Sale

Dell has generated a total of $6.5 million in revenue from their Twitter presence, how are you doing on Twitter to drive sales? Let me share some tips on how to launch Twitter campaign to drive sales.

You need to build tons of followers; depending on the nature of your business, you can launch different campaigns to attract people to follow you on Twitter.

How to Increase Twitter Followers

1. Be honest about who you are. Don’t hide your ass in a civilian’s suit; a honest about who you are and what followers can benefit from following you. Do fill in the bio in your Twitter account.
2. Send regular and relevant tweets. But, never ever spam your followers; add value in your tweets.
3. Use pictures. Pictures are heavily retweeted.
4. Encourage followers to retweet your links. Sometimes, simply adding “Pls RT” works.
5. Inform people your presence on Twitter. Put it in your email newsletter, catalog, packaging, website, facebook, business cards…
6. Use #hashtag in you tweets. It’s a way to get found.
7. Use Qwitter to receive alert when someone unfollows you after a tweet
8. Run a Twitter contest to give prizes for followers
9. Hijack your competitors’ followers.

Tease the Promotion to Build Momentum

Set a date for your promotion and start teasing the promotion one day in advance. Threadless enjoyed the benefit of teaser strategy; here is an sample of their teaser tweets:

5:00 p.m. — “Anyone else getting the feeling that something big is happening on Threadless tomorrow?”
6:30 p.m. — “Srsly, you’re going to wanna stay up LATE tonight to get in on the 999 Threadless fun.”
7:00 p.m. — “5 more hours until 9/9/09 hits @Threadless! (CST, btw, k?)”
9:33 p.m. — “We can’t comment on rumors. Giggle nervously, sure. 2.5 hours and counting til 12am Central Daylight Time. Wait. Is that a comment?!”

The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything. Teaser tweets is a good strategy to build the buzz; but, only do it occasionally for your big sale event.

Encourage Retweets

Now the day of your big sale event has come. How well your teaser tweets did remains unknown until the sale is over. What else can you do?

Send out the sale tweet at the right time. What time is the right time? No one can answer for you but yourself. Make sure you have tested and analyzed tweets from different time to find out the one with highest CTR.

Once your sale message is out on Twitter, encourage your followers to help promote it by retweeting. As “pls RT” doesn’t always work and won’t work on every follower, more “motivation” is needed. Give away chances to win attractive prizes to followers who retweet your message.

Do not wait till the end to announce the winners who retweeted your tweet. Send out the prize announcement through out the one day sale and at the same time encourage more retweets.

Track & Measure the Twitter Campaign

Now the sale campaign is over; how well you did on Twitter is what you need to find out.

• The number of retweets
• Clicks (you can use URL shortener like bit.ly, which is my favorite). This may be less than the actual number as some users may copy and paste the actual URL from browser to their favorite Twitter platform like TweetDeck. You need to use your web analytics as well.
• The number of sale generated from Twitter
• Total revenue from Twitter
• CPA
• ROI

Test it before you launch it; every campaign is also an opportunity to learn and improve.

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Tagged as: sales, social media, twitter