A “Twitter Day” for a digital agency

Social media & digital agencies.
By Penny Driscoll.

Since our very first Tweet in December 2009, we’ve been huge fans of Twitter. It’s a communication channel, lead acquisition source, client services tool and learning hose to drink from.

We've launched our MY2010 site: http://tinyurl.com/yg5u9od

— Connected ⓦ Digital Agency (@connected_uk) December 9, 2009

And the Twitterverse seems to have liked us. We’ve piled on nearly 10k followers and are lucky enough to be frequently re-tweeted, quoted and shared. We haven’t gone mad, and try to curate what we Tweet out – which goes someway to explain the quality of our followers.

A day in the life of

For a digital agency, Twitter is a lifeline for watching trends and also contributing to the wider conversation. We’re a WordPress agency, so most of our on-site content revolves around WordPress, but Twitter allows us to share a little bit more of our thinking and inner beliefs.

On the right is a typical day of outbound Twitter (click to enlarge): 2 Tweets about new content on our site, a couple of re-tweets and 5 shares of interesting content in and around the digital space.

We have a team of 4 people working on social media, watched over by me and integrated as part of our bigger content strategy plan – which includes content publication (WordPress, of course), SERPS management and PR.

To avoid clumping of posts we use BufferApp to schedule and report on Tweets. It’s a fab tool and everyone in the company has it installed on their devices so they can add interesting Tweets as and when they find them. This collaborative approach to social media encourages quality and rewards early-finds.

Surprisingly (or maybe not), those not involved directly in the sharing and tweeting of content frequently use Twitter as a way to stay in touch with what our company is doing. So, although we have an enterprise social network (@Podio) most people stay up to date from our Twitter feed!

And what do we get back?

We get a pretty good level of engagement. On the right (click to enlarge) you’ll see about 50 new follows, a few shares, a few direct Tweets and (not shown) is a handful of DMs.

Twitter is integrated into our client services portal, and clients use this via open and DMs to ask support questions and raise tickets. These tend to be more generic, and are often handled using our automated response system. It’s growing as a support channel, and it’s kind of self-fulfilling: We respond quickly to Tweets, hence clients use Twitter as a way to reach out to us.

Our CEO, Martin Dower (@MartinDower) started this all when he got hooked on Twitter in early 2008. He twitter id is pretty low (<15m) marking him out as an early adopter, but he tells me he was actually introduced to Twitter by a front-end coder who worked for us at the time. Sam (@NocturnalMonkey) started on Twitter in 2006 and is account no 50373. That’s super early.

Cost versus value

Over the years we have derived direct value (i.e. leads) from Twitter, we’ve also widened our network, hired people and made recommendations. As a digital agency, we’re also expected to eat what we cook, and that means using Twitter in a similar manner to how we advise clients. Would you really buy social media services from a company with a non-existent or poorly utilised Twitter feed?

In fact, with such a high percentage of communications now flying around the Twitterverse you be missing out very badly if you didn’t dive in and get engaged. So, the final benefit is one of credibility: we’ve been on Twitter for nearly 5 years and have a decent following.

The WordPress Agency world

According to Google, we rank in the top 10 of WordPress Agencies, and compared to our competition we stand proud in the Twitter space and have more followers than ALL of our competition combined. Most have Tweets and followers in the low hundreds, a couple don’t have a corporate feed, despite many of them being on Twitter for a number of years.

Happy Tweeting