We work in the B2B sector and while I am a fan of saying there is no B2B or B2C it’s all people to people there are obvious differences.
We have found this carrying out some side work for one of our friends, 6Somewhere.com who import premium Normandie Cidre. They have done a terrific job and have got their great cider onto the shelves of Tesco. Because they had this early success they haven’t gone through the long hard slog of building an audience online through social media. So we offered to help them build that audience. They have focused on Instagram and Facebook and we are starting to look at Twitter.
We have previously had great success in building a Twitter following for companies. This time though the audience is different and we are not controlling the content or frequency of posting.
So while we have increased their following by over 200% it’s not been plain sailing. If we benchmark it against a similar campaign we are picking up about 40% fewer followers for the same level of work. We are putting this down to two factors, the first, mentioned before is that we are not in control of posting so can not influence the type of post or the time. Followers want great content and we provide this for our clients but we know nothing about Cider so we can’t produce this for 6somewhere without using one of our external team, and as we are doing this for a favour we don’t want to pick up the additional costs. The second reason is that the follower profiles are different to our usual audience.
Thinking that Twitter users are al alike has resulted in unusual results. We know normally that we can get a company from 0 to 1000 high-quality relevant followers in about 6-8 weeks. With non-business Twitter accounts, we think this time scale will be 10-12 weeks.