Last week, we wrote the first post in our "Campaign Spotlight" series about our Facebook Page Visit campaign. Continuing the series today, we’re going to cover our Twitter Follow campaign!
What Does the Twitter Follow Campaign Do?
You guessed it: with just a few clicks, you can incentivize your site visitors and customers to Follow your business on Twitter. Your customers and site visitors will be able to Follow you directly from the Swell widget on your site!
Why Should I Use It?
Many of the benefits of an increased social media presence (which we discussed in our Facebook Page Visit spotlight post) also apply to the Twitter Follow campaign. To recap, we identified three principal reasons why virtually any business stands benefit from a robust social media presence:
- Trustworthiness – Having active Facebook and Twitter accounts for your business, complete with posts, pictures, and lots of Followers, automatically boosts trust visitors and customers will have in your business. With increased trust comes an increased likelihood of future visitors and additional purchases.
- SEO – While Google has stated that metrics such as number of Twitter Followers do not directly contribute to SEO rankings, keeping an active page can still improve your site's rank; the content you post is more likely to get shared and reposted, which in turn will help your social media pages themselves begin to rank highly on the SERP (Search Engine Results Page).
- Engagement – Perhaps most importantly, Twitter Follows and Facebook Page Likes are critical because they automatically "subscribe" all of your Followers to any future updates you post about your business. Engagement is the first critical step on the Repeat Purchase Pathway – the more posts a consumer views, the more likely they are to ultimately purchase from you.
Twitter has also put together some nice resources which describe - from a more quantitative perspective - just how valuable a single Follower can be for smaller businesses. We recommend reading the linked article in full (it’s not too long, and has lots of pictures!) to gain a better understanding of the “flow” that a Twitter Follower goes through to generate value for your business, but below are some of the highlights from the article – along with what they could mean for your store:
- 74% of people who follow small-to-medium-sized businesses (SMBs) follow to get updates on future products. This point follows the notion that you can consider your social media followers "subscribers" who are eager to learn more about your business!
- 85% of Twitter users feel more connected to an SMB after they begin following the business.
- 47% of people who follow brands are more likely to visit the company’s website. To take it one step further, not only will your followers visit your site, but the traffic will be extremely high-value; many of your visitors will have completed the "Engage" and "Learn" steps along the Repeat Purchase Pathway, and arrive at your site ready to buy (if you run an e-commerce store) or to learn more.
- And perhaps the most important statistic of all: 72% of followers are more likely to make a future purchase!
How Do I Set Up a Campaign?
At the end of the day, it's probably not too surprising that adding high-quality followers can lead to a significant boost in traffic for your site and revenue for your business. Swell can help you add new followers by giving them a small incentive just for clicking the "Follow" button and subscribing to your future updates.
The Twitter Follow campaign design screen is incredibly simple to use. Here’s what it looks like:
As you can see, getting up and running with a Twitter Follow campaign requires only three pieces of information:
- Decide what you’d like to name the campaign (i.e. what consumers will see on your site).
- Tell us how many points to offer for each successful follow.
- Let us know what Twitter handle we should direct your newfound Followers towards.
That's all we need, because we handle everything else for you on our end! The Twitter Follow campaign also comes with all of the usual bells and whistles that you’ve come to expect from a Swell campaign by now. Consumers can learn about the campaign in the widget, and you can send customizable emails to your customers to ask them to follow you (and earn rewards in exchange for doing so).
How Much Should I Offer for a Follow?
Hubspot has put together some compelling thoughts as to how much each of your social media followers is worth. While that formula of theirs may look complicated, it boils down to a few simple variables:
- How many followers you have
- How often you lose followers
- How frequently you include links to your site
- How often those site links get clicked
- The conversion rate once a visitor lands on your site
- The value of each conversion
While the conversion-oriented variables are mentioned with e-commerce stores in mind, brick and mortar business can still apply the same variables (and use estimates for in-store conversion rates).
By the way, the principles in the Hubspot article hold true for both Facebook Likes and Twitter Followers. Pay special attention to that “how frequently you include links to your site” variable (i.e. how often you post) – that one is directly under your control!
The calculator that Hubspot includes in their article is a handy and effective way to figure out how much each one of your followers is worth:
Hubspot's "value of a like" calculator can help you quantify the value of your social media followers, regardless of whether they're Facebook Likes or Twitter Follows.
While many of you may find that the value of each of your followers is higher than you may have previously realized, we recommend starting with 50 to 100 points per follow and adjusting as necessary.
A Couple of Notes to Wrap Up
One of the most exciting parts of our Twitter Follow campaign is that all of our merchants can run it – no premium monthly subscription required! We believe that Free plans should still provide meaningful value to merchants, so we're thrilled to be able to offer our Twitter Follow campaign to everybody.
It’s also worth reiterating that much of the value of your Twitter followers is dependent on the quality of the content which you create! Simply having Twitter followers is not enough; once they’ve “subscribed” to all of your future updates, it’s your job to keep them up to date with new product information, photos, and anything else you think they might enjoy! Remember, the more you post high-quality content, the more valuable each of your followers becomes! In future blog posts, we’ll go deeper into what it means to create “high-quality” content for your social media followers.
