It is true that Sri Lankan brands are making their presence in Twitter at a increasing pace with various means of promotions. It is impressive to have Sri Lankan brands on Twitter timeline. However, many brands who are on Twitter make some common mistakes and let’s talk about those here .
Many brands who are present on Twitter have a Facebook Fan Page and to save time most companies tend to link their Twitter account to their Facebook fan page to generate auto tweets. When the Facebook Page status is updated, it automatically appears on Twitter timeline with a link to the status update on the Facebook Page. These auto tweets give the impression that those brands are not bothered about updating their Twitter followers but only have time to update their Facebook Fans. Besides, it is not user friendly to make people who are used 140 characters on Twitter to read long updates by redirecting them to another web page.
Many brands talk about the Sri Lankan Spirit on Social Media when they carry out promotions on Twitter. However, none of the brands use local languages (Sinhala/Tamil) in communicating with their customers. May be you can argue saying that Twitter is built to be used in English Language. But Sri Lankan Tweeps use Sinhala and Tamil when they communicate with each other. Therefore, brands can use local languages which would create more friendly timeline for local bands.
It is common for international brands to reveal the person handling the Twitter account on their Twitter page as well as at the end of each tweet. Usually they add the nick name of the person who is Tweeting from the Brand profile to enable multiple users handling the account. However, except for few local brand, Sri Lankan brands do not reveal the identity of the person who is handling the account. If the identity of the admin is revealed, it would create less confusion while building the trust among its customer which is a must in the social media marketing.
Local brands are so fond of sharing blog posts/videos/updates from their websites with their customers. But in many occasions, links they post on Twitter do not get redirected to the desired blog post/web page ending up in 404 error. This leaves the customers really dissatisfied about attempting to open links which do not exist.
At last, but not least the major mistake made by local brands on Twitter is that they do not reply to their mentions received from their followers. A survey carried out by Ami’s Space says that 85% of local brands on Twitter do not reply to their mentions received. Further, they do not carry out any monitoring process to gather the feedback from their customers. Feedback that are submitted as mentions are never taken in to consideration.
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Well concluded post.
1. Is also applicable to using tweet platforms like Tweet Deck or Hootsuite to schedule tweets. It doesnt look nice when the engine link appears in the tweet. And sometimes they schedule because the person is busy at that time leaving no one to reply to the responses from the twitter community.
3. No Identity Revealed – Is i think the biggest problem. Only brand successfully doing this right (As i know) is Dialog. Please update if there are others.
Again – well done Hajara – Keep up the good work…
Thanks Nadheera for your value additions to the post..
well, some do auto posting from twitter to FB as well, which is not nice either.
At the end of the day, most of the brands don’t have actual customers, but followers of the outsourced admin who happens to be a well networked person.
This is one of the issues CEO’s are skeptical about SM campaigns in SL. Needs more realistic focus to make it a real success among business.
Isura,
Thanks for your insight. I agree on your view about the followers vs actual customers. But we still have to agree that SM campaigns have done a lot of positive changes to conventional marketing in Sri Lanka.