Selling with Content

Content Marketing Lessons of the Top 10 Retweets of 2010

  In social media circles, retweets are great currency. If you can create content, even if it’s under 140 characters long, and retransmit it through hundreds or thousands of individual Twitter accounts, it is communication gold.

The top 10 retweets of 2010 give insight as to what magic the top performers contain. Many are from celebrities, but that alone is not the secret sauce considering the thousands of tweets from celebs that did not make the cut. 

First, let’s look at the basic nature of the content contained in the top ten tweets:  

 

• Average number of characters per tweet: 69, less than half of the 140 character limit
• Average number of words per tweet: 13, short and sweet
• Used humor: 5 of the 10
• Personally connected: 5 of 10, here the tweet only made sense if you know the person (or celebrity) involved.
• Offered wisdom: 3 of 10

So personal connection, humor, and wisdom, ruled the top tweets. Tweets about a personal mood, personal experience, real time experience, or news item, did not make the cut. 

Here are the top ten tweets of 2010:
1. Stephen Colbert: in honor of oil-soaked birds, 'Tweets' are now 'gurgles.
2. Drizzy Drake: We always ignore the ones who adore us, and adore the ones who ignore us
3. Lil Wayne WEEZY F: aaaaaaahhhhhhmmmmm baaaaakkkkkkkkkk
4. Justin Bieber: te quiero mucho mi amor
5. Al-Qaeda: Just noticed Twitter keeps prompting me to "Add a location to your tweets". Not falling for that one.
6. joe jonas: I cry because I love Justin Bieber!!!
7. Lady Gaga: I'm beautiful in my way, 'cause God makes no mistakes. I'm on the right track, baby. I was Born This Way.
8. Kanye West: I'm sorry Taylor.
9. Rihanna: Justin Bieber just flashed me his abs in the middle of a restaurant! Wow! He actually had a lil 6 pack! Sexy,lol!
10. shitmydadsays: Don't focus on the one guy who hates you. You don't go to the park and set your picnic down next to the only pile of dog shit.

But there were more ingredients.

Each of the top tweets, in their own unique way, captured a universal feeling, moment, idea, or bit of wisdom for many. 

Stephen Colbert used humor, but his “tweets are now gurgles” quip defined the frustration we all felt about the BP oil spill. Lady Gaga’s tweet defined her whole unique performance attitude that has mesmerize millions, while the fake Al-Qaeda tweet poked fun at Osama Bin Laden, something we all like to do.

In conclusion, be universal.  

Share humor or wisdom. Both universally appreciated.

Find a way to make a universal personal connection. You do not have to be a celebrity if you tap into a universally known person or personal experience. Few know the Tweeter behind "Shit my dad says," but everyone has a dad. Few know the identity of the fake Osama from Al-Qaeda, but everyone knows who he or she is pretending to be.

There is nothing like a good universal tweet to bring us together.
Happy Holidays!

Official list of top ten retweets from Twitter

The $877.9 million Twitter content strategy

In July 2009 Amazon.com bought online shoe retailer Zappos.com for $887.9 million from entrepreneur Tony Hsieh (pictured).

At the time, Amazon was selling many products online: books, consumer electronics, movies, toys, and tools. Why spend all that money just to add shoes when Amazon could have easily added a shoe line of their own?

Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, said he was motivated to buy because Zappos had a unique corporate culture and brand. But it was Hsieh's ability to communicate the essence of these using Twitter that captured a national audience and created a competitive selling advantage. Hsieh opened his Twitter account in June 2007 and by 2009 had over 1.5 million followers, one of the 100 most followed in the country.

Surprising to many Hsieh, did NOT Tweet about: shoes, online retailing, or Tweet special shoe offers. In fact, Hsieh only owned 10 pairs of shoes and was rumored not to know much about any of them.

Here is what Hsieh did Tweet about: his obsession with customer service. Why was Tweeting about this, and not shoes, such a successful content strategy? Two reasons:

1. The people side of customer service is far more interesting than shoes. Even if you are a shoe fanatic, there are thousands of shoe websites to visit. One more Twitter stream would not make a difference. But as a customer service obsessed CEO on Twitter, Hsieh was the only game in town.  

2. Customer service is the key issue holding back most first time shoe customers from buying online. Think about it. Selling books online is easy because the book you buy in a store is as good as the same book you buy online. But a when buying a pair shoes, their fit is critical. In a store, you try them on, and the fit is assured. But buying shoes online is a big risk unless the online retailer has a high enough level of customer service to overcome the “fitting” problem.

Customers who might worry what happens when the shoes do not fit or how fast returns can be made need a lot of assurance to keep them from just visiting a local shoe store.

But customers who bought into Hsieh's obsessive view of customer service were more likely to give online shoe shopping a try. First sales with new customers became the defining moments in the Zappos success story because about 75% of Zappos sales came from repeat customers.

One more thing, Hsieh used Twitter to tell a whole story, not just share a series of short, clever Tweets. Here is his explanation:

"Think of each tweet as a dot on a piece of paper. Any single tweet, just like any single dot, by itself can be insignificant and meaningless. But, if over time, you end up with a lot of tweets, it’s like having a lot of dots drawn on a piece of paper. Eventually there are enough dots for your followers to connect them together. And if you connect the dots, in the aggregate it paints a picture of you and/or your company, and it’s that total picture that is your brand.

Think of each tweet as a dot on a piece of paper. Any single tweet, just like any single dot, by itself can be insignificant and meaningless. But, if over time, you end up with a lot of tweets, it’s like having a lot of dots drawn on a piece of paper. Eventually there are enough dots for your followers to connect them together. And if you connect the dots, in the aggregate it paints a picture of you and/or your company, and it’s that total picture that is your brand."

The essence of a great content sales strategy is that it both attracts an interested audience and delivers content that Positively affects that audience's buying behavior. Hsieh's Twitter program did both. Think about your organization's content. Does something bigger happen when you connect the dots?