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What we can learn from Microsoft’s Twitter Strategy?

In a recent white paper by Microsoft on social media marketing, it unveiled some of their social media strategies i.e. what they think about social media and how they slowly learnt the social media tactics and leveraged the various social media platforms for their benefit.

Social Media marketing require careful planning, according to the Microsoft spokesman:

“Decisions need to be made about resourcing, desired outcomes and tactical considerations before suggesting your audience follow you or become a fan “

It also requires substantial investment in time, education of staff and execution, to keep social media conversations alive and viral.

The Initial Scenario:

According to the initial case study by Microsoft, two important segments of their target audience existed on twitter. First, a huge proportion of search engine marketers were using Twitter to communicate, share best practices, and look for news and views that could give them a competitive edge and stay ahead of the PPC game. Second,  “cries for help” issued by their customers to the followers, asking for advice or general statements about adCenter--some good, some bad--that in an ideal world should have received some acknowledgment from them.

Hence, there were major groups of target audience, one comprising of the prospects and information seekers and the other consisted of existing customers desperate for help and advice.

So, How Microsoft managed to handle the situation? How Microsoft syndicated content on Twitter for their prospective customers?

Microsoft initially set up @adCenter as a means of auto syndicating content from the adCenter blog onto Twitter via Twitterfeed.com. Following were the main objectives while performing the activity:

If people re-tweeted to their audience, the blog posts and other information, it was meant to be taken as a vote or endorsement that their bloggers had provided some helpful and actionable insight.

• Increase the audience reach, pushing out content rather than relying on advertisers to come to their site every day.
• Get real-time stats on who was clicking on the Tweeted links and where that audience was located.
• Understand what content is appreciated most by measuring re-tweets and discussion on Twitter around a particular topic.
• Measure what day and time of day was optimal for our readers to receive content.

What Microsoft learnt from these steps?

First of all Microsoft spokesman confirmed in the white paper that they did successfully achieved the above mentioned objectives and increased their social media penetration but they also learnt some very important lessons:

• We felt strongly that simply syndicating content with no interaction with followers was not really in the spirit of Twitter
• We started replying and reaching out to marketers who wanted to know more, putting them into contact with support teams or other areas of the business they were interested in.

Hence, passive and single sided syndication of content is not enough, social media marketing should be blended into the organization culture and different departments must act collectively to bring positive and useful results.