Twitter’s rise over the past year has been pretty impressive all round, and indeed it has seemed clear for a while that sooner rather than later the huge marketing potential of the social media platform would be noticed by major brands and companies. Sunday’s Superbowl provided yet another example that this time has already come…
Online marketing experts Socialmedia.com have delivered an interesting report on the comparative success of all the various ads featured on the TV coverage of the Superbowl during the game’s time-outs and intervals. The yardstick for measuring the impact and success of ads was, of course, Twitter.
Analysing how many tweets mentioned the brands in question immediately after an ad aired, and for how long tweets continued to feature the subject was the core of SM’s approach. They are the first to admit that this is not an overall and comprehensive assessment of an ad’s impact but stress that it is nonetheless a useful new tool for guaging initial impressions.
It is Twitter’s hyper real-time nature that is the key to its usefulness for such analysis: the site essentially provides a manageable and realistic body of data which would otherwise be largely unobtainable – asking people in a survey later on for example about which ads they remembered/liked would produce entirely different results.
Since Twitter embodies people’s transient real-time first impressions in text, it is a unique instance of such data that can be extensively studied and organised.
These casual initial impressions are essential for marketing firms in assessing the effectiveness of their work. However, while other methods for gathering such data had their strengths, few techniques could produce such authentic and broad results. They must be loving this new fangled TwitterĂ‚Â market analysis approach right now…
In the same week, Dell has announced that it will be offering significant discounts on some of its products exclusively through Twitter. The company enjoyed huge success over the holiday period by using Twitter to promote sale items and discounts, and is clearly keen to build on this.
Ultimately these are just two examples of the growing significance that social media is playing in marketing and consumer trend research. Facebook too after all announced only last week that it is to expand the ways in which companies can use users’ data for product research.
All in all this seems a totally natural consequence of our increasing tendency, and trust, in putting our authentic selves online. There’s something slightly creepy about all of this data that we use for social purposes being used and endlessly analysed by corporate execs and marketing analysts, but it seems to be the inevitable price we pay for access to such free social media…
Dejan Levi