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Twitter: Social media engagement alone “doesn’t mean anything”

MelissaGlobal Twitter brand advocate, Melissa Barnes, has told a forum of Australia’s leading marketing professionals that social media “engagement”, on its own, is meaningless and that they must focus on achieving results.

Barnes delivered the keynote speech in day two of the Mumbrella360 conference in the first ever Australian public address by the micro-blogging media giant.

“I hate meeting with brands and asking them what their goals are and they tell me it’s “engagement”, said Barnes. “Engagement doesn’t mean anything”.

“At some point the CEO is going to look at what you’re doing, and so you’ve got to figure out a way to show how you’re moving the business needle.”

“A mistake we see brands make sometimes is that they approach Twitter like you would display advertising, and they hit someone with something super-promotional, that doesn’t make sense within the context of the conversation, and people feel like they’re getting an ad… it’s a missed opportunity”.

Barnes also rejected a report in today’s edition of The Australian which reported that Barnes had said Australian companies lack sufficient strategies to boost “their bottom line.” 

“I read it and my heart dropped… because I think the point I was trying to make, and this is in general, is that we’re meeting with brands to today to help with their strategy, and it’s not people aren’t smart and they’re not strategic…  people here are super smart, they’re absolutely thinking about things the right way, they just need other examples and inspiration.”

“Thanks for bringing that up because [there] are lots of brilliant Australians”.

Barnes argued that while there will always be some degree of risk when using the platform that should not deter brands from using the medium to increase their customer reach.

“When you think about promoting a tweet, conceivably it could go any sort of way, you don’t know where it’s going to go” said Barnes.

“You’ve got to get brands comfortable with saying things that not everyone’s going to like… one of things we do when we first meet with brands is to help them understand what’s the baseline of sentiment right now for your brand at the moment, get comfortable with it because guess what, there are probably going to be some people out there who don’t like you .. the opportunity [on Twitter] is to shift that sentiment”.

In the wake of recent Twitter gaffes by Australian companies, most notably last month’s NDIS gaffe by Myer boss Bernie Brookes, Barnes had some general tips for brands to employ when public sentiment starts to turn against them.

“But often when you’re looking at an issue on Twitter there are a couple of considerations that we tell people to look at. The first is that you want to check momentum, is the issue growing, are there more people talking about it, is it building?

“You also look at influencers, if influencers enter the conversation, that’s sometimes a sign that you should get more involved because they’ve got a lot of power and a lot of influence”.

“You never just want to give a pat answer because the response should be different depending on the context”.

Julian van der Zee

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