by Mike Charbonneau
The Canadian International AutoShow's Twitter page.
I have been using Twitter with a client, The Revue Cinema, for probably a year and it’s been going quite well. For The Revue, a not-for-profit community-run cinema with few dollars for marketing, Twitter has been a great tool which we’ve used as an electronic marquee. It lets followers (those who decide to follow your Twitter feed) know about upcoming events and what’s playing at the cinema that day. So I started looking at our other clients, to see who else could benefit from exposure to the Twitterverse. The first one that made sense and seemed like a good fit was the Canadian International AutoShow.
So we created an identity for the AutoShow on Twitter and started to fill this new channel with links to automotive stories we thought would interest our followers. We then asked our client—who was in Germany at the Frankfurt Auto Show at the time—to tweet from the floor to give our readers insight on the show. Over the course of a few weeks, we slowly increased our followers to about 40 people. Not bad, considering this isn’t usually the time of year when people think about the AutoShow.
Closer to a month into the campaign, I created a hashtag—#autoshowcanada—to help people find the AutoShow on Twitter. Within 5 minutes, two people had retweeted (RT) the hashtag in their own post. By the tenth minute, another person had retweeted. So what’s the big deal and what’s all this talk of retweeting? Let me explain.
Up to this point, we had 43 people following the AutoShow on Twitter. Whenever we would tweet anything, only those 43 people would see our message. The instant that three people retweeted our message, it meant that it would now be seen by their followers. So in the space of 10 minutes, our conversation with 43 people grew to a potential 3,000. This is called message amplification.
Of course, not everyone of those 3,000 saw the message and of those that did, many had no interest. But, there was a noticeable effect. Over the next couple of weeks, our number of followers grew to over 100. Now, you should know that the number of followers is not the best metric to measure your success on Twitter. Why? Well, that’s another entry for another day. But if you are interested in finding out if your business can benefit from the flexibility of Twitter, give us a call and we’ll help you out.
