08 Feb Case Study: Twitter as a Direct Sales Tool
There’s often debate about the use of Twitter as a sales tool – whether it’s possible to glean a definitive ROI from a Twitter campaign in terms of actual sales. While Dell states that it makes $6.5million from microblogging, many brands are sceptical and most small businesses wouldn’t even consider it. But I have stumbled across (now there’s an idea for a website…) a fantastic example of direct selling on Twitter that I feel compelled to applaud.
Last week I posted the following tweet:
Inside of 24 hours I received a reply from a user called @ShowerThinker that said: “Look no further. Write down your great ideas in the shower. http://bit.ly/dcnRw”. Intrigued and genuinely quite excited that someone was using Twitter to such apparent great affect, I clicked on the link and bingo – AquaNotes! A waterproof pen and paper specifically marketed for use in the shower.
Taking a critical marketer’s look at @ShowerThinker (as I am unfortunately prone to do with every brand page I visit on Twitter), I have to say that I admire and resent this use of Twitter in equal measure. The stream consists solely of replies to people who have obviously mentioned the word ‘shower’ in a tweet. Every tweet is push marketing, a reply to the tweet with a sales message and a link to the website. This grates with me somewhat, given that Twitter is really all about communities.
On the other hand, however, @ShowerThinker has nearly 19,000 followers: quite a community of brand advocates. And for the company to be on the ball enough to continuously monitor Twitter and pump out targeted direct sales messages is quite something. Dell doesn’t do that, Starbucks doesn’t do it and Innocent doesn’t do it.
My conclusion? Good on ‘em! I have to give much kudos to @ShowerThinker for devising a very simple, but I’d imagine very effective method of using Twitter to increase web traffic and presumably, sales. As for me, I’ll be buying AquaNotes to capture my shower-inspired ideas. So you might be reading posts I wrote when naked in future!
What do you make of @ShowerThinker’s use of Twitter as a sales tool? Please leave a comment…
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