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Marketers: Twitter Chatbots Must Have For Digital Branding, Customer Service and Sales Strategy

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“Messaging is one of the few things that people do more than social networking” – Mark Zuckerberg But there are only a few platforms that people are messaging on. 72% of U.S smartphone users use less than 7 apps in a day. In response to this consumer behaviour, the social platforms that we all know and love started letting companies build chatbots with them. This created a need for existing platforms to step up, and large platforms started letting businesses build platforms on top of them.

Credence Research recently predicted that enterprises would transmit two trillion messages a year by 2017 to create a market worth $78m by 2022. The chatbot can talk to you through different channels, such as Facebook Messenger, Siri, WeChat, Telegram, SMS, Slack, Skype, among others. Consumers spend lots of time using messaging applications (more than they spend on social media). Therefore, messaging applications are currently the most popular way for companies to deliver chatbot experiences to consumers.

Now people won’t need to download an app to interact with brands. They can just build a bot on popular platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Skype etc. and instantly reach people on whichever device and platform they use. A chatbot’s conversational interface lets companies communicate in the moment, in a personal way; real businesses with real results. Due to sheer volume, Facebook is by far the most popular platform on which businesses launch their chatbots.

However, the below points explain why brands must have Twitter chatbots as an integral part of their digital customer service and sales strategy.

Live Events and Streaming Driving Traffic on Twitter

For example, there were 103 million tweets sent about the Winter Olympic Games and, in total, this led to 33.6 billion Impressions (views on and off Twitter) of tweets.

Twitter is now worth more than Snap!

Twitter now has a bigger market cap than Snapchat maker Snap, after posting a thoroughly interesting earnings beat for its fourth quarter this morning.

Oscar After Party Live streaming Got Over 2M Viewers

During Q4, Twitter live-streamed around 1,140 events, with 60% of those reaching a global audience. In addition, 28 million live user-generated streams were broadcast in the quarter across Twitter and Periscope. For example, Vanity Fair’s 2018 Oscar Party Livestream got over 2M views on Twitter.

And Twitter is the most popular tool for people to have their discussions on before, during and after an event.

Q4 results show MAU/DAU are on the rise

Twitter averaged 330 million monthly active users in Q4. Analysts had anticipated 2 million MAU net adds in the period. In Q4 2016, Twitter gained an average 1 million monthly users. During Q4, Twitter live-streamed around 1,140 events, with 60% of those reaching a global audience. In addition, 28 million live user-generated streams were broadcast in the quarter across Twitter and Periscope.

Real-time Twitter Data Invaluable for Customer Insight

Markets get huge real-time insights from ongoing Twitter engagements about their products, industry and customers. For example, Microsoft recently launched a data analysis system to assist bots.

“These systems do not simply repeat what is said to them or respond with canned answers. They teach themselves to carry on a conversation by carefully analysing reams of real human dialogue. At Microsoft, for instance, a new system learns to chat by analysing thousands of online discussions pulled from services like Twitter and Reddit. When you send this bot a message, it chooses a response after generating dozens of possibilities and ranking each according to how well it mirrors those human conversations.”

Twitter Filtering Out Spam(y) Bots

Twitter is getting serious about its bot problem.According to the new rules, developers that use Twitter’s API will no longer be able to let users: Simultaneously post identical or substantially similar content to multiple accounts.Simultaneously perform actions such as likes, retweets, or follows from multiple accounts.

Use any form of automation (including scheduling) to post identical or substantially similar content, or to perform actions such as likes or retweets, across many accounts that have authorised your app (whether or not you created or directly control those accounts).The new rules, which come in the wake of a larger spam and bot crackdown, are meant to prevent many of common tactics that bots use to, say, make a hashtag trend or spread spam.

Twitter Announces New Enterprise-Focused API to Improve Chatbot Experience.

And now Twitter has improved its enterprise offering so that developers can build more conclusive and engaging experiences via chatbots. “Today’s news of the new enterprise Account Activity API is a part of those promised changes. “Specifically, the API is designed to help developers build apps that can power customer service, chatbots and brand engagement on Twitter, the company says – an area Twitter has been increasingly invested in this year.”

Conclusion

Twitter has traffic, real-time data insight along with the right support to launch an interactive campaign, and therefore Twitter is increasingly recapturing the eye of marketers who want to engage with their customers, increase sales and build brands. And with more advanced support for developers, Twitter chatbots must be the obvious choice to become a critical part of companies’ customer service and sales strategy to leverage this platform.

We at Tweepforce are building Twitter bots for consumer electronics, HR, automobile, publishing, retail and many other industries, on our reusable and scalable technology sitting on top of the IBM Watson AI platform. That helps brands to build the right user experience over time to align with their KPIs.

TweepForce is Officially Launching!

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TweepForce is Officially Launching!

TweepForce is a suite of Twitter e-commerce tools for businesses, digital agencies, and digital in-house teams who recognize the power and potential of tapping into the social media market in a new, game-changing way via Twitter.

More than 300 million people use Twitter on a daily basis; it’s an enormous market that has been largely void of e-commerce capabilities, until now. With TweepForce, businesses are able to make their products and services available for purchase and for reservation to customers – right through Twitter.

What is TweepForce?

TweepForce is a self-service suite of Twitter tools that allows businesses to sell their goods and services to customers. Businesses can make products available for purchase and/or for reservation, and customers can easily and quickly complete transactions using hashtags that are designated by the businesses.

By using TweepForce for Twitter e-commerce, businesses are able to measure and manage customer information, they are empowered by automating yet personalizing Twitter engagement, they generate leads and follow up in real time, increase conversions, and are able to leverage the power of Twitter e-commerce – all with the easy-to-use TweepForce Twitter tools.

What Kinds of Businesses Use TweepForce?

Any brand that wants to enable their customers to buy and/or reserve products through Twitter can benefit from teaming up with TweepForce, which offers a viable, profitable solution for businesses in any niche, and in any industry.

Restaurants can allow customers to reserve tables; entertainment venues can make access to tickets available; shops can enable customers to purchase goods – the possibilities are endless with TweepForce. Brands running tweet-to-buy and tweet-to-reserve campaigns are able to actively control their campaigns with tools for profile management, product management, campaign management, and more.

Read up on a few case studies of actual TweepForce clients and see what TweepForce does to help their businesses reach the millions of potential customers that use Twitter every day.

Why Should Digital Agencies Use TweepForce?

TweepForce has opened up the Twitter market to businesses and agencies who want to improve sales conversions, increase traffic, and save money on advertising. Brands that use the TweepForce suite of Twitter tools stand out from the competition, as they are able to offer a unique, powerful sales delivery channel.

In addition, digital agencies that use TweepForce are able to offer new, industry-leading channels to use for driving sales – something that established brands with larger budgets are constantly searching for. It’s the big-budget companies that are looking for agencies that can offer an alternative to the same old marketing ploys – they’re looking for brands that use TweepForce.

For many companies, businesses, and agencies, the marketing portion of the budget is huge – sometimes astronomical. Unfortunately, much of that budget is spent on marketing techniques, methods, and tactics that either don’t attract enough of an audience or attract the wrong type of audience – the type that isn’t interested. One unique aspect about TweepForce is that it enables the customer to initiate the conversation, instead of the other way around.

In this manner, marketing budgets used for TweepForce aren’t spent creating and pushing ads randomly that can cost millions of dollars, only to be ignored or brushed aside by consumers who aren’t interested. Instead, agencies that use TweepForce are able to spend less on a marketing channel that is more effective, and is also customer-initiated. Instead of paying millions to push non-focused ads all over the Internet, with TweepForce, businesses are able to increase sales and ultimately, their ROIs, thanks to a controlled, powerful marketing channel.

The mobile market is huge, and Twitter commands an enormous number of users. 80% of those who use Twitter do so right from their mobile phones and devices, so TweepForce is the ideal suite of tools to turn that usage into sales! Agencies can even white label TweepForce offerings, which means they are able to offer their own clients the ability to cater to the millions of mobile Twitter users, increase their mobile following, gamify product discovery and reap the benefits of increasing their presence in the mobile marketplace.

Businesses, digital agencies, and in-house digital marketing teams who want to take a new, profitable approach with e-commerce rely on TweepForce to create analytics-driven campaigns that are targeted, customer-initiated, and focused. From drastically reducing the marketing budget to increasing sales conversions, businesses reach no limit when they use TweepForce as their Twitter marketing tool. Get started for free today.

Why We Love Twitter Key Facts (And Brands Should Too!)

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Why We Love Twitter Key Facts (And Brands Should Too!)

Recently Twitter revealed their Q2 earnings for Year 2014 and, in a huge surprise to its critics, Twitter has posted substantial growth in terms of monthly active users and revenue, and as a result their share price surged by 30%. We have compiled all the key facts that have contributed enormously to Twitter’s recent success and can be very useful to help brands to use Twitter to grow their businesses.

1: Twitter monthly active users (MAU) have grown by 24% and are now around 271m.

2: 640 timeline views per MAU in Q2.

3: Unlike critics’ estimate, only 5% of MAU accounts are considered as spam.

4: 173bn Total Timeline views in Q2, up by 15%.

Twitter MAU Timeline Views

% of Twitter spam users

5: Quarterly revenue up by 124% to $312m.

6: Ad revenue up by 129% to $277m.

7: Data licensing revenue up by 90% to $35m.

8: Ad revenue is $1.6 / 1000 timeline views.

9: Ad revenue is $1.15/MAU.

Twitter revenue q2 2014
Twitter timeline revenue

10: In Q2 brands answered 297,478 fan questions on Twitter, compared to 61,707 on Facebook.

11: Twitter accounted for 2.5% of the world’s mobile ads.

12: Twitter’s recent acquisitions of Gnip (data licensing), CardSpring (Card payment) and Mad Bits (image processing) indicate a strong inclination towards facilitating commerce for brands.

13: Dick Costolo believes the embedded tweet features takes Twitter’s reach beyond 271m MAU to 1bn people.

What Will Twitter Commerce be like in a Year’s Time?

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What Will Twitter Commerce be like in a Year’s Time?

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo set his sights on Twitter commerce in 2012, and since then, to consolidate their commerce offerings, the company has been rigorously launching new product features (such as Twitter cards), partnering with brands like Coca-Cola, Starbucks, and Amazon, and acquiring social commerce and analytics companies like Gnip, MoPub, CardSpring, MadBits, and Bluefin Labs.

It seems the stage is set for Twitter to enable commerce for brands; However, commerce on any platform means users should be able to find, buy and have products delivered to their doorstep, on any device, whether it is mobile, laptop or tablet, which would not be an easy task for Twitter, being an open platform with a focus on engagement rather than transactions.

Based on Twitter’s recent product updates and acquisitions we have looked into how Twitter commerce will possibly look like for brands in years to come.

1: Tweet to find product

For any business, the first step in any commerce cycle is to enable customers to find their products and services, and on Twitter that can be done in two ways.

First, Twitter advertising, which means based on a Twitter algorithm around users interest, sponsored tweets will appear on a user’s timeline with a details of products and services. Such as the Twitter mobile app, which has recently gained momentum, where an install option within the tweet takes users directly to the app store. However, when the Twitter timeline view/MAU is in decline, it may not be the best way to find stuff on Twitter.

Second, the customer can tweet to brands to find the product; this is like a product search feature on any ecommerce website, where a user can enter the product name, keyword, category and/or location to find the relevant product. This feature will become more popular, especially when Twitter’s main focus is engagement.

2: Tweet to add a product to the shopping basket

Like an online ecommerce site, once a user can find a product, the next step is to add that product to a shopping basket and to replicate that feature on Twitter; Amazon has recently launched a feature where users can reply to an Amazon tweet with #AmazonBasket hashtag to add products to their online basket. This is still early days and a hybrid approach where the user needs to link their Twitter and Amazon web accounts before using this feature, but a stone has been laid in the road ahead.

3: Tweet to buy product

This is the most challenging and critical area for Twitter to resolve, because to buy a product within a tweet they have to obtain the user’s credit card information, and being a very public platform, I would doubt users would be happy to give their credit card details to or on Twitter. However, Twitter has recently bought CardSpring, a start-up that can link users’ web/social accounts and credit card and be used both on and offline, so possibly users will be able to buy products using CardSpring technology.

Another potential approach could be to allow users to only reserve product on Twitter and then process payment when they arrive at an offline store. For example, for one of our clients (an online restaurant booking service), we have enabled a service where users can reserve their table on Twitter and pay at the restaurant.

4: Tweet to Deliver Product

Twitter has already made huge progress in delivering product with examples like Tweet a coffee and Tweet a Coke. Twitter has partnered with Starbucks and Coke so that users can go on brands’ websites and link their Twitter account and credit card to the brands’ web accounts. Thereafter they can send gift vouchers just via a Tweet. It is still a hybrid approach but in future, via CardSpring technology, Twitter would enable users to link their Twitter accounts to credit cards, after which they can simply tweet to buy a product without linking their Twitter account to brand’s web account.

5: Tweet to customer service

Twitter customer service is already at a very advanced stage, many companies have customer support handlers in place who promptly response to any user queries. In fact, there are many incidences where users have taken to Twitter to force companies to respond publicly. In addition to socialbakers, recent research has confirmed that Twitter has beaten Facebook by far when it comes to customer care.

6: Tweet to reward people

American express runs a Twitter loyalty program where users are rewarded every time they use hashtag (#AmExOffers). There is huge opportunity for running loyalty programs on Twitter, as there are many entities attached to a tweet, such as text, image, location, URL, hashtag, tag pictures, @mention etc. and users can be rewarded every time they use these entities to engage with brands.