The human race is more mobile than ever. People don’t just interact with your company in-store or via the desktop at home. It’s therefore essential for businesses to embrace a mobile-first mindset with their strategic use of platforms like Twitter and emerging trends such as video and livestreaming.
Karen Stocks, Managing Director of Twitter for Australia & New Zealand, has given us some valuable insights on how businesses can use Twitter to reach their customers, and why they need to adopt a mobile-first strategy.
Twitter is a platform where people talk about what’s happening in the moment. It allows businesses to do a couple of things: one, it allows businesses to speak to customers when they are in a highly engaged state and searching for information, second, it allows businesses to join in on conversations that are relevant to their business.
People are surprisingly predictable. If you tracked the amount of conversation around coffee every day, you would see trends for when people are talking about coffee. So if you’ve got a cafe or you supply coffee, you can target these conversations and go, “Hey, have you seen what we’ve got to offer?”
Another significant way small businesses can use Twitter is from the customer service perspective. We’ve seen a strong uplift in customer service on Twitter from big businesses like Qantas, Telstra, Optus, all the banks, and from smaller businesses as well.
The flip side of customer praise is, of course, customer complaints, and people will take to Twitter for that too. Customers have discovered that if they tweet they get service more promptly than if they call or email, because it’s played out in public and it’s transparent. But what we’ve seen is that if a business actually deals with a bad customer experience to resolve it promptly then the customer’s affinity to purchase is stronger and they are a stronger advocate for your business than they were before.
Even if you are a small business with limited staff and resources, you can’t just opt out. There’s an expectation now from the customer that a business will have a mobile-first presence, including social media. It’s best managed through transparency and setting expectations up front. I hear from businesses, “What if I’m not able to answer tweets on the weekend?” and that’s perfectly fine, because what you need to do is put on your profile when you are able to answer questions.
City of Sydney do this well. At about 4 or 5 o’clock on a Friday they get on Twitter and say “We’re off now, have a great weekend, we’ll be back Monday”. So people know when the City of Sydney Twitter handle is open for business and they get brand-compatible reminders. A lot of the smaller banks have done that as well. The Bank of Western Australia, for instance.
The other thing to do is be really smart about how you manage your Twitter handle. SMEs need to be strategic about using their down time. If you have employees who are in the store or on the register, give them access to the Twitter account. Give them policies and guidelines, but then let them have a go. Businesses try to hold on to things too tight; but if you trust your staff to talk to customers you can trust them to tweet.
Mobile technology has absolutely had a huge impact. Let’s take Twitter to start with. Twitter was created on mobile and we are absolutely a mobile-first company. The character limit for tweets was set at 140 characters because that was the limit for SMS, it was basically a public text message. Over 80% of our usage is primarily from mobile, and over 90% of video views on Twitter are coming from mobile devices. Twitter is mobile.
If you think about the way people use their smart phones, it’s all mobile-first now, so I don’t believe you can be successful in business without a mobile-first strategy. Customers want information when they are on the move. If you are not there to service their needs, if the website doesn’t load properly, or they can’t find your number, or you are asking them too many questions, they will just move on.
If you don’t need that information right then, don’t put a roadblock in front of a customer; it might be great for your marketing database to have all their details, but the mobile customer is going to leave and then you have nothing. What used to be acceptable practice because people were at home or in an office and willing to spend the time doesn’t hold true now; the mobile mindset is different and people in business need to adjust their thinking to match.
The big trend we’ve seen in the past 12 months has been around mobile video. Consumption of mobile video on Twitter is going gangbusters and has increased 220X in the last 12 months. Not a 220% increase, but a 220 times increase. What that’s telling us is that when consumers are out and about they want to see sight, sound and motion in their Twitter feeds.
The question for business is how do you create informative videos for consumers that are short, sharp and hit the point? We did some research with the Dentsu Aegis Group in Australia and found that including people at the start of a video advertisement for your company or product was two times more likely to make someone view the ad. Other key factors include making sure the value for the customer is clearly identified, using a structured storytelling approach and making the video entertaining.
Essentially, consumers have made the transition to mobile, and businesses have to embrace the mindset to make that change to being mobile-first. If they don’t, those customers who are already mobile, will just move on.