Proposing a Twitter marketing maturity model

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately looking at Twitter as a customer service and marketing channel (see my latest SearchCRM column here).  Especially since I recently joined the founding team of a new social marketing apps start-up, Offerpop, to extend and leverage the work I have been doing at Evoke CRM over the past 8 months.

As discussed in prior posts and my SearchCRM piece, Twitter can be a very effective alert and listening channel, and with the right offer, creative and positioning, can be a great viral and word-of-mouth channel as well.  But Twitter is not for everyone, and needs to be part of a well-thought-out multi-channel marketing program.  It also has certain dependencies, e.g., you can’t really use viral coupons at scale until you have a sufficient base of followers.  And while Twitter can be great for starting discussions and sending out links to a special event or offer, you still need to create the assets for followers to register, distribute the coupon code, track retweets and response rates etc.

 

While Offerpop aims to provide the apps needed to streamline some of these tasks, I also continue to focus on the trends, best practices and frameworks to help organizations prioritize and scale up their overall social media and business initiatives.  One framework that I’ve been playing with is a Twitter marketing maturity model.  While still evolving, I think it could be a useful tool for looking at the stages of social marketing on Twitter, extending some of the CMM ideas I started last summer (see that here), and also calling out specific activities and metrics (and apps) needed to best leverage this channel.

Here's what it looks like currently:

 

I’d love your input, comments and ideas.  And also would be happy to share more details about Offerpop as we continue our private beta.

Comments

[Bruce Daley]

Very interesting idea. I can actually monetize my time spent on Twitter? Looks like a winner to me.

[Mishra7000]

Good stuff. As community owners, our followers vary, in terms of messages that get their attention and engage them. A simple structure like this can help guide what we're tweeting and how much. Helps answer 2 familiar questions: How do we make our Twitter/Facebook updates interesting to the broadest set of our followers? How do we best use these channels to achieve specific biz objectives?