Posts Tagged ‘twitter’

Technorati have introduced a new feature to their website called Twittorati.  Twittorati is an area where people can see what Technorati’s top 100 bloggers are tweeting about.  The subjects of the blogs are on a variety of subjects and as a result the tweets are a weird and wonderful mix of opinions, stories, news items and random comments.

Twittorati allows you to see tweets in real time and they can be organized by latest tweets or by authority ranking.  Tweets can be filtered using Technorati tags and Twitter hashtags.

Personally, I feel it is a great resource to check on a morning to find latest news and developments in a variety of subjects.  Also a great place to find quality people to follow on twitter.

If ever there was an example of what not to do on your social media campaign this would be it. Habitat, the major UK retailer has been engaging in some very underhand tactics through the popular social networking site Twitter.

With only a few followers on their Twitter account Habitat chose to promote their new sale in a rather unethical manner. Using the popular hash tag facility Habitat targeted keywords that had absolutely nothing to do with their current sale but are heavily searched upon within Twitter e.g. #Apple, #phone and even #Mousavi.

One thing is for sure they certainly got people tweeting about their brand but not in the way they had intended. The spammed twitter users were furious with the blatant misuse of the tags.

It would appear that Habitat have now deleted their initial attempt at promoting their discounts and instead have started engaging with followers in a more ethical way.

Although this was a tough lesson learned by Habitat I can’t help but feel they have severely damaged their brand and whilst they can try to hide the evidence, it is almost impossible to remove completely.

In the past year the micro networking site Twitter has grown in traffic by 10 fold in the past year (source: Hitwise).  Twitter is one of the fastest growing sites on the internet and looks like this is continued to grow.

How can you make the most of Twittering?

Let me explain the opportunity by giving you a scenario. Company X has set up a twitter monitoring postings related to their products they sell on their e-commerce website.  One of the alerts shows someone is looking for a voucher for their website.  They respond to the individual with a discount voucher for their site.  If they had not been monitoring Twitter, one of their competitors could easily have taken this opportunity to promote their site.

Including Twitter monitoring as part of your online marketing mix or part of your social media marketing is certainly worth considering as the website is growing so quickly.