By Marci Reynolds

Is six weeks enough time to prove out a social media Twitter strategy? Do tweets result in revenue?  These are a few of the questions I attempted to answer with Alyssa Dver, a very successful marketing consultant from Boston, MA.

Here is a quick summary of results from our six week, Twitter test…

By publishing high quality, targeted tweets and interacting with her Twitter community, Alyssa increased her followers by 55%, was retweeted 35 times, was added to 22 Twitter lists, one of her tweets was included in a branding quote article and she was discovered by some very influential Twitter users including Kent Huffman, the CMO of BearCom Wireless.

Did Alyssa generate any specific revenue during the six weeks? No, not yet. Did she increase her online visibility and further promote her brand? Yes, definitely!

I consider Alyssa’s six week test a huge success and have encouraged her to continue actively managing her Twitter presence. I am confident that over time, tweets will lead to revenue.  As social media evangelist, Gary Vaynerchuck states in his best selling book, “Crush It”, “social media is not a silver bullet”. But, if you invest the time to do it well, day after day, it will pay off.  He’s proven that by using social media to build his wine business from a few million to a multi million dollar empire.

Here are more interesting details about Alyssa, our six weeks and 106 tweets…….

Alyssa Dver… Client, Self Proclaimed Social Media Skeptic

I was introduced to Alyssa Dver, the President of Mint Green Marketing, via one of my business contacts as someone who “needed help with social media and Twitter”. Alyssa is a wildly successful marketing consultant, author and keynote speaker living and working in the Boston area.

I had the opportunity to see Alyssa present at the Massachusetts Women’s Conference, in December 2009, on the topic of marketing your small business. I was impressed with her energy, grasp of the subject matter and her ability to engage her audience members.

However, I remember Alyssa enthusiastically stating that “we won’t be discussing social media and Twitter today”. She shared that although social media is important, she planned to focus on the traditional marketing strategy and tactics.

A few months before her Women’s Conference presentation, Alyssa was interviewed by Marcy Shinder, the VP of Brand Marketing for American Express Open. Her blog post titled, “Is social media right for your business” presented a number of different viewpoints in support of and against social media. In the article, Alyssa was described as having a “more cautious view on social media” and that one of her “pet peeves” was the current obsession with social media as a way to create real business leads.

When Alyssa and I began discussing a possible social media strategy, she joked that she had been referred to as a “social media skeptic” or “grinch” in prior months and she shared some very valid reasons for her hesitance to jump into social media.

With everything that entrepreneurs (and salespeople) need to worry about, they need to make sure that the effort and subsequent return of social media, tweeting in particular, is something that is worthwhile.  They should put their available resources, time and money where they get the biggest impact and social media isn’t always the answer.

We also discussed that you need to make sure that your target customers are using social media. If they’re not, who will you interact with and attempt to influence?

These are very valid points and I agree with Alyssa. This is why testing social media is a great idea, before committing significant resources to the activities.

The Social Media Test

After a few discussions about social media options, we agreed to complete a six week test focusing on enhancing her Twitter presence. Alyssa had signed up for Twitter under the brand “@no time marketing” earlier in the year, but had rarely used her account. (FYI, “No time marketing” is the name of Alyssa’s most recent, best selling business book.)

The test was important to Alyssa for a few reasons. First, since she is a Marketing Consultant, she wanted to increase her own knowledge of the medium, and be able to share first hand experiences with clients. Second, Alyssa was interested in increasing her online presence and brand, with the goal of driving business (revenue!) and capturing more key-note speaking engagements.

Our Tweet Content Strategy

Considering Alyssa’s social media goals, we created a tweet content strategy that blended her own “thought leadership tweets”, links to her own content, links to other relevant content and retweets from the users she followed. The content themes included marketing, entrepreneurship and women in business.

Since Alyssa is a marketing expert and author, we had a lot of great content available to access. We took her book “No time marketing” and turned the content into 140 character, “thought leadership” tweets. Here are some examples:

• “If we don’t know intimately about our “purchasers”, marketing can become academic, expensive, and irrelevant.”
• “While you may want to sell to both existing customers & new prospects, make sure that you have enough resources allocated to do both well”
• “Lead generation programs must produce enough volume to allow for longer than expected sales cycles, and budget or org changes”

Although Alyssa does not maintain her own blog, she guest blogs for others on a regular basis. I reviewed this content and created tweets with hyperlinks, to her best and most relevant posts.

And I continually scanned the blogosphere for high quality blog posts that aligned with her content strategy as well as appropriate retweet material. The blogs that had the most relevant content were The Wall Street Journal, Entrepeneur.com, Forbe’s Woman and The Harvard Business Review.

When the length of the tweet content allowed, I included the hashtag #marketing, to further increase the readership of her tweets, when accessed via Twitter search.

We scheduled three tweets per day Monday through Friday and one tweet per day Saturday and Sunday.  Alyssa also participated in #followfriday tweeting.

Followers & Following

Relying on my experience managing multiple brands on Twitter, I know that you can increase your number of followers, by following other Twitter users. I’ve found that at least 50% will follow you back.

However, for the six week test, we relied on organic growth only. We did not proactively follow anyone new and instead, let her Twitter activity attract followers.

In addition, I only followed back Twitter users that were aligned with Alyssa’s interests and social media goals. For example, I followed back Christine Crandell, “Strategist and CMO specializing in driving step level change in B2B enterprise technology and Saas” and I did NOT follow back life coaches or multi-level marketing spammers.

The Six Week Test Results

• Alyssa increased her followers from 203 to 315, an increase of 112 or 55%
• Alyssa’s content was retweeted 25 times.
• On December 31, one of Alyssa’s thought leadership tweets (“Successful marketing used to be a matter of creativity. Today, it’s a matter of precision.”) was included on the Black Coffee blog, accessible here:  http://www.blackcoffee.com/brand-related/branding-quotes/
• Alyssa was added to 22 Twitter Lists including @craigpsmith’s “awesome-new-englanders”, @verkauffoerdern’s “marketing-mix” and @Noa_Adamsky’s “product-management”.
• Alyssa was followed by several, very influential Twitter users including Kent Huffman, the CEO of Bearcom Wireless. Kent is often listed as one of the top CMOs to follow on Twitter and has more than 14,000 people following his Twitter stream.

What Did Alyssa Think About The Results?

Here is how Alyssa Dver summarized our test results: “I think we proved that effective tweeting can raise one’s profile online and possibly over time enhance the brand.  But if your customers aren’t looking for this kind of information, it doesn’t implicitly increase your sales and so it can yet be hard to justify among the many other things you could be doing for your business.  Like all marketing programs, its only one tool so decide if it’s the best for your company and if so, commit to doing well and for a while.”

About Marci Reynolds

Marci Reynolds is a Sales & Marketing Consultant, Blogger and Author from Boston, MA who specializes in Sales Operations, Inside Sales and Internet Marketing best practices, services and support. She also has a side project called J2B Marketing, helping job seekers with “social media & job search”. For more info, visit http://www.marcireynolds.com and follow Marci on Twitter via @marcireynolds12 or @j2bmarketing