Marketing Monday: Snoozefest (Twitterlytics!)

Today I'm digging this article from Hootsuite, on how not to bore your readers.

Frankly, I think not boring your readers is a large combination of smarts, current marketing wisdom, and that just-right mix of magic and mojo that's hard to put a finger on. One thing I really like about this article is that it goes into Twitter analytics a bit. I'm a big fan of analytics. Huge. Numbers tell stories we'd be foolish to ignore.

If you're not paying attention to your Twitter analytics, get on that.

From your home page, click on your avatar in the upper right corner. Scroll down and click on analytics.

Woo! Look at all that data. Hootsuite advises in this article (and I tend to agree) that your engagement rate can give you a good snapshot of where you are. They describe the engagement rate as "a number calculated based on the number of impressions (i.e. how many people saw the Tweet) and the number of engagements (link clicks, favorites, retweets, etc.) with your Tweets. Obviously, the higher the engagement rate, the better you’re doing." Access the engagement rate from the analytics, by going to the "Tweets" tab at the top of the page. Once you're on the "Tweets" page in analytics, the engagements metric is to the right, and looks like this:

Screenshot from hootsuite.com.

On that same page, you can click on 'Top Tweets' to see which of your tweets got the most engagement. The results just might surprise you.

There are some other gems in this article, but it's a good opportunity to walk you through how to use Twitter analytics. Twitter is a good platform to experiment a bit, depending on your brand and your voice, and being able to see the results of those experiments are what make it worth it. Again, you might be surprised by what your top tweets are: they aren't always the ones that you get you the most RTs or replies.

Marketing Monday: Epicene, Third-Person Singular Pronoun

I do so enjoy people getting het up about grammar.

This video covers a topic that I find interesting and have never thought about quite in this way. Many languages have gender-neutral third-person pronouns, but English is often thought not to be one of them. That thinking is wrong, and Colonel Sanders' grumpy brother here is about to school you.

If you want more, you can find his grumpy language blog here. A choice quote from a recent post: "I’ll take pie rather than cake, gin rather than vodka in my martini, and silence rather than noise about pet peeves." (I'm definitely with him on the gin, and I suppose we did serve pie in lieu of cake at my wedding.)

Get assimilated.

Marketing Monday: Fruit of the Loom

Fruit of the Loom has had some really terrific ad campaigns over the last few years. This one about appropriate underwear gift-giving cracked me up with its poignancy when it first hit the small screen a couple years back. (Raise your hand if you're a married, 30-something woman whose mother still gives you undies at Christmas.) (Hi, Mom.)

More recently, this ad makes me laugh every time it pops up. The thing with clever marketing is that if it doesn't help you remember the brand or product, what's the point? Fruit of the Loom nails it because they manage to be funny, memorable, and brand-appropriate while highlighting the features of the product. No easy feat for many brands, but particularly impressive when marketing unmentionables.

Enjoy!

Bonus: these aren't bad, either.