How Brands Can Benefit from the Latest Twitter Updates

Over the past two weeks, Twitter has made some important changes to its platform that can enhance the way brands build, engage, and manage their social communities. I will examine the three biggest changes that will have the most impact on brands’ social marketing strategies–email notifications, Follow Button, and photo and video services.

1. Email Notifications

On Monday, May 23, Twitter updated its email notification services. Before the update, users could only receive emails when someone began following them or sent them a direct message. Now you can receive emails every time somebody you follow favorites or retweets one of your tweets. Additionally, you can receive emails when someone replies or mentions you. While the automatic change had many furiously tweeting that their inboxes were now being unnecessarily clogged, the update is easily changeable by adjusting a few settings.

While brands with millions of followers will not want to receive notifications every time a follower mentions them, they may want to know when someone they are trying to establish a relationship with–whether a potential customer, client, vendor, business person, or media source–begins to connect with them.  Both small businesses and global brands can take advantage of these new services to strengthen their community management and engagement strategies.

Benefits for brands:

• You don’t have to be signed into Twitter to stay part of the conversation
• Instant notification means you can react immediately
• Use the notifications as starting points to reach out to new contacts
• By seeing which of your tweets are acted upon, you can craft a more effective tweeting strategy to include tweets that are more likely to incite responses

2. Follow Button

Following in the footsteps of Facebook’s Like Button, Twitter launched its Follow Button on Tuesday, May 31. This button can be implemented onto third-party websites to allow visitors to instantly follow a Twitter account without leaving the site. Adding the button is a quick a simple process. More than 50 websites have already implemented the button such as The Wall Street Journal, IMDb, and The Huffington Post.

Benefits for brands:

• Convert website visitors into followers
• Increase social engagement by building a strong community of active followers
• Drive traffic to your website

3. Photos and Videos- Sharing and Searching

One of the most buzzed about social media topics this past week was the announcement of Twitter’s own photo and video sharing service on Wednesday, June 1. Tweeters no longer have to rely on third-party applications like Twitpic or yfrog to upload their content. In conjunction with this new service, which will be rolled out over the next few weeks, Twitter has also revamped its search feature. Now when you search a hashtag or trending topic, the top images and videos associated with that search are displayed on the right side bar.

Arby’s took advantage of this to promote it’s new Jamocha Oreo Shake by sharing an image of the shake with the #13thingsilove trending topic. The photo ended up being the third top image associated with the hashtag and has been viewed by over 2,000 times in 24 hours. Without the new search features, the photo would have only been seen by those who either follow Arby’s, saw a retweet on their timeline, or happened to look at Arby’s page. Linking it to a trending topic opened it up to a much wider audience.

Benefits for brands:

• Expose your photos and videos to a larger audience
• Attract new followers
• Spread awareness of promotions and campaigns

Have you embraced any of these changes for brand? Which feature is the most valuable to you? Let us know in the comments!