Using Twitter to Strengthen and Promote Research (A Case Study)
Problem
The Keller Center for Residential Real Estate Sales & Marketing Research is a new research center at Baylor University's Hankamer School of Business. In the summer of 2008, the Center released its first research report.
The research is aimed primarily at residential realtors. Our challenge was to promote the research within the realtor community. Additionally, we needed to bring the realtors into the research process, allowing the Center to include their feedback into studies.
About Twitter
Twitter is a social networking tool. Messages, limited to 140 characters, can be sent (tweeted) to followers. Some call this micro-blogging. Messages can be sent and/or received from your phone, from your logged-in home page (at twitter.com), or from many third party applications.
Hankamer School of Business established a profile on Twitter, twitter.com/Baylor_Business, in April, 2008. The tweets consisted of an RSS feed from the Hankamer website - each news item posted on www.baylor.edu/business automatically fed to Twitter (through the TwitterFeed application).
Implementation
On July 17, I issued a press release from the School revealing the results from one of the studies included in the Keller Center research report.
I conducted a search of Twitter user profiles. There were 519 users with the word "realtor" in their bio. From the Baylor_Business profile, I "followed" almost every one of these realtors.
If a realtor visited the Baylor_Business Twitter profile and had chosen to "follow" Baylor_Business, each "follower" was greeted with a personal welcome tweet and a link to the real estate research. They were also encouraged to take part in an online survey.
Results
Within 48 hours, over 100 of the realtors had visited the Baylor_Business Twitter profile and had chosen to "follow" Baylor_Business. 6 weeks later, there were approximately 140 realtors following Baylor_Business on Twitter, with a few additional realtors following each week. According to TwitterCounter, as of January 23, 2009, Baylor_Business had 277 followers.
Dozens of Twitter realtors "retweeted" the research report, sending it on to their own networks of followers. Several other Twitter realtors, also bloggers, blogged about the research. I think this is what accounts for the "echo spikes" on the web analytics report (see chart below).
Dozens of those realtors have also taken part in an online research survey, further strengthening Keller Center's research studies.
Almost 22,000 users have visited the Keller Center website (about 55,000 hits), with the largest spike of activity occurring the week of September 21: 8862 hits.
The response rate for this Twitter campaign has been far higher than for any direct mail or advertising campaign I've done in my 20+ year career.Why? Because the right content is being sent to exactly the right target audience in precisely the way they want to get communications.
