Twitter as mobile marketing for your customers
Twitter is a great medium for sending free SMS (mobile text) messages. For those reading this not involved in the mobile industry, SMS is expensive, both in terms of cost, and time to set up.
We here at TwelveHorses.com consult to businesses about mobile messaging, Twitter, and how to integrate with these technologies. Here are some ideas that we’ve seen, and some that we’ve pitched to clients.
In your Restaurant, you have a “For coupons and info, send Follow MyRestaurant to 40404 from your cell phone” Then on Tuesday evenings about 5:30, when things are slow around dinner time, you Tweet “Free desert with dinner tonight if you mention this coupon.” In this respect, you hit all your interested customers, right at the dinner hour, wherever they are.
You’re a ski resort. You want to inform your skiers at the time they specify when fresh powder has reached x inches deep. To facilitate this, you build an application to send mobile messages to your interested skiers when snow reaches a certain depth. They sign up to follow your ski resort’s twitter with their phone, and you use the Twitter API to send them direct messages at the time they specify when the fresh snow is the depth they want.
You’re an online auction company, and you want to send out tweets for items that are undervalued 30 minutes before the auction ends to drive up prices. You integrate the Twitter API with your application to send those alerts out as public tweets, and invite people to join that twitter for killer deals.
You’re an airline. You have flights that have known empty seats. You integrate with the Twitter API to send out tweets 4 hours before a flight with empty seats and the heavily discounted price you’re willing to sell those seats for.
You’re a stock broker. You want to very quickly inform your clients about great stock deals. You have them sign up to follow your tweet, and as deals come through that you think they need to know about, you tweet them, and your clients receive the results.
You want to generate buzz about a new TV show on network XYZ. You announce prior to the show how to sign up for the show’s Twitter, and during the show, you have the director tweet the inside scoop on what’s really happening, almost like a directors commentary, but live with the broadcast of the show.
Really, the possibilities like this are endless, and can be tuned to your specific business model.
With Twitter, your message gets to the customer wherever they are, and with information that they want to know.
Clint Goudie-Nice
Architect / Senior Software Engineer
August 15th, 2007 at 1:41 pm
Jet Blue is trying this but they only have 422 people following them on Twitter. I don’t think that’s too effective.
There are some SMS tools coming out that will make it easier for businesses to harness the power of SMS for less than existing systems now available. They will also be easier to use as a thrid party tool than Twitter.
Steve, I’m looking forward to lunch
August 17th, 2007 at 8:39 am
Chris, I definitely agree with your point (both about looking forward to lunch, and about twitter).
Twitter can be unreliable, and slow. But if you are a small business that wants to send mobile, and send it right now, with no understanding of how it works, and no cost involved, then this is a cool way to just print a sign and be off and running. There are very few effective marketing mechanisms that will let you reach people at the appropriate time, regardless of location, and do it for free.
Now I know, that there are other ways… from the simplest which might be sending to [phone number]@[appropriate carrier domain name].com to deliver an SMS, to the most costly, slow to ramp up, but most powerful (two-way campaigns with your own shortcode).
But one of the most innovate things that twitter offers is that not only is in a mode-agnostic delivery mechanism (it’s not just mobile) of content, but it also handles all of your opt-in, and opt-out for you. Pretty cool for free.
I do, however, look forward to applications that allow more of us to leverage mobile in more powerful ways without the currently painful and costly process of CCF forms, and fighting with carriers and aggregators.
See you at lunch
August 17th, 2007 at 9:58 am
Twitter can at times be slow and unreliable, however the cost benefit (cost free, and quick to setup) vs the cost of going through a full CCF process with an aggregator is something I believe makes Twitter compelling solution for businesses that don’t need the more reliable delivery that a full mobile integration will offer.
To echo what Steve said, the opt-in/opt-out process is a big deal to the cell providers, and is something that if not followed very carefully, can quickly get your SMS campaigns terminated. Twitter handles this portion of logic quite elegantly.
What it really boils down to is, what is the need?
If the need is to have mostly reliable text message delivery in reasonable window of time, Twitter is a good option; and even provides an API you can utilize.
If the need is to run a serious mobile campaign, dealing with tens of thousands of text messages, (For example, an American Idol, or the Doritos X13D Name That Flavor contest) a full CCF, shortcode, and an messaging platform such as MessageMaker is currently what you’re looking for. Additionally, you can text message directly to mobile numbers, rather than having your customers go through a more significant sign up process like Twitter.
August 18th, 2007 at 4:45 pm
hi i enjoyed the read