Product Marketing Rule #13 from the best-selling book, 42 Rules of Product Marketing, was written by Cindy F. Solomon, Founder,The Global Product Management Talk @prodmgmttalk
The qualities that make Twitter seem inane and half-baked are what make it so powerful. – Jonathan Zittrain, Harvard Law professor, Internet Expert @zittrain
In an Agile world, product marketers must employ the most efficient means available to engage in real time product/market conversations. Twitter is a powerful broadcast and content marketing vehicle for PMMs to master.
Twitter Qualities To Emulate
Concise: A tweet is limited to 140 characters. Be terse. Develop and share content that is precise intentional, informative and interesting.
Open: Twitter is public and archived on the web. Be open to discovering the value of your product from others’ perspectives. Dick Costolo, Twitter CEO @dickc says: “Pay careful attention to the things that people do with your technology/service/product, because some of them may have discovered a powerful use for it that has completely evaded you.”
Cross-platform: Twitter works across all platforms, operating systems and devices. Tweets are viewable from Twitter website, mobile apps, SMS/text messages, Facebook and LinkedIn status updates. Integrate product communications across all media to guarantee consistency and trustworthiness. Optimize content to exploit strengths of each platform. Target messaging to emphasize unique value for each audience.
Scalable: The ability of a system/network/process to grow quickly and/or accommodate and facilitate spikes in growth. Develop content that easily grows and extends reach, such as Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) and glossaries. Be sure to include key words optimized for search engines. Incentivize your audience to add content with support forums, blog comments, and wikis. Encourage customer accolades and case studies. Repurpose and refresh existing content for on-demand reading. Utilize Twitter Chat hashtags to crowdsource new content, and capture tweets into transcripts.
Tweeting Strategies To Implement
Listen & Monitor: Search Twitter for product related terms, issues, events and hashtags. Lurk at Twitter Chats and create twitter lists of your target audience and market space. Use tools such as Klout, to identify thought leaders, prominent bloggers and competitors, then analyze their behavior and connections.
Create & Broadcast: Tweet valuable information worth re-tweeting at optimal times to promote product lines, provide incentives, invitations, and share industry news. For example: “Please retweet: [article name] [by @author] [shortened URL] [optional comment] [#hashtag]”. Utilize URL shorteners (bit.ly, tinyurl.com, goo.gl) and attach keyword #hashtags.
Analyze & Track: Identify tweeting behavior patterns and determine metrics; Study how timing and headlines affect retweets, label “Favorites” to save highlights and testimonials, monitor “Follower count” to measure distribution power, track the number of “@Replies” to measure community engagement and utilize social media tools that provide additional analytics.
Engage & Dialogue: Develop trust by being human, consistent, relevant, and unique as well as generous, attentive and positive. Ask questions, agree, or challenge politely to trigger and extend specific conversations. Always acknowledge and reply (@twittername), retweet (RT) valuable information worth sharing, and thank people for retweeting. Use the Direct Message (@DM) capability to private message a follower (DMs won’t be listed in public twitter stream). Host, sponsor & participate in regularly scheduled #hashtag Twitter Chats, such as The Global Product Management Talk #prodmgmttalk to extend community vibrancy, increase followers, and deepen product/brand affinity.
Product Marketing Rule #13 from the best-selling book, 42 Rules of Product Marketing
