If you’ve ever wondered if Twitter is the right social media platform for promoting your subscription business, consider these statistics:

• 320 million monthly active Twitter users
• 42.6 million smartphone Twitter users in the U.S.
• 6,000 tweets, on average, are posted every second
• 500 million tweets are posted per day
• 200 billion tweets are posted per year

Many subscription companies are using Twitter successfully with followers in the millions and tweets in the tens of thousands, and the most successful in this list is the newest to Twitter – Vogue with 11 million followers!

 

Account	Dated Joined Twitter	# of Followers	# of Tweets
Vogue Magazine (@VogueMagazine)	Apr. 2010	11.00 million	38,100
Apple Music (@AppleMusic)	Sep. 2009	8.40 million	24,700
Washington Post (@WashingtonPost)	Mar. 2007	6.36 million	175,000
Dropbox (@Dropbox)	May 2008	4.36 million	2,547
Newsweek (@Newsweek)	Mar. 2007	2.82 million	72,300
Netflix (@Netflix)	Oct. 2008	1.95 million	16,000
Spotify, multiple accounts (@Spotify)	Nov. 2008	1.77 million	23,800
Boston Globe (@BostonGlobe)	Dec. 2009	469,000	165,000
Salesforce (@Salesforce)	Apr. 2009	292,000	46,700
Birchbox (@Birchbox)	Jan. 2010	174,000	71,000
Scribd (@Scribd)	Mar. 2008	81,700	10,900
EA Access (@EAAccess)	Unknown	63,400	10,300

 

We love Twitter and find it is a good way to share subscription news, events, insider guides and other exclusive and premium content, as well as interacting with Subscription Insider members and followers (@SubInsider). It is also a wonderful way to discover other subscription businesses, learn from Twitter users we follow and to share content from other sources.

In this installment of our Subscription Biz Basics series, we’ll share 15 tactics you can use right away to promote your subscription or subscription box business on Twitter:

1. Tweet teasers of soon-to-be-released content to get fans and followers excited about coming attractions! Here Netflix tweets a trailer for the second season of Chef’s Table, coming to Netflix on May 27:

 

 

2. Use Twitter to announce new partnerships, collaborations, products, services and features. Here Dropbox tells followers that it has updated its Windows 10 app, linking to a blog post with screenshots and details.

3. Share important information on Twitter by linking to blog posts, web pages and landing pages and via images. In this case, editorial columnist Courtney Webb (@cwebb711) used Twitter to post an infographic, creating a visually appealing way to share details on subscription pricing models. Infographics and other images are a clever way to get around Twitter’s 140-character maximum.

 

 

Here’s another good example from Salesforce who shares one of its core values.

 

4. Share BREAKING NEWS with readers to be timely, topical and relevant and show your subscription company is a “go to” resource. Here’s an example of a New York Times’ tweet linking to a live stream of Donald Trump’s address to the state GOP convention in California. This was a great tool to help the Times’ share news of the stream quickly and timely.

 

5. Offer special promotions through free tweets and sponsored posts like this one from the Wall Street Journal. Here the WSJ offered a 50% discount to those who subscribe by clicking on the embedded link. It has been retweeted 85 times and liked 226 times so far. Bonus tip: Create a sense of urgency by attaching a time limit and reminding followers that time is running out (e.g., Two days left to take advantage of this one-time subscription offer!)

Subscription companies can use sponsored posts (i.e., paid advertisements) for a number of different purposes including increasing engagement, website clicks or conversions, app installs or app re-engagements, video views, adding followers and collecting leads.

For a promotion like the Wall Street Journal’s above, the cost of the ad campaign depends on how many Twitter users actually click on the website links. The subscription company chooses a time period for the ad, selects a target audience, sets a budget and develops the creative, or tweet. Learn more about sponsored posts directly from Twitter.

 

6. Explain a plan change, strategy, price increase, product launch or other items of interest relevant to your followers. This is an easy way to share information and be transparent to your followers about what’s going on at your subscription company. In this example, NaturalBox.com explained that it is expanding so it can produce its own branded natural and organic products with vegan alternatives. The tweet shares the announcement and links to a blog with details.

7. Utilize Twitter as a customer service tool to engage with customers, offer support and solve problems. It is an immediate, public way to assist a customer or to let your subscribers know about system outages or problems. Many large subscription services like Spotify, Salesforce and Sony PlayStation have separate accounts just to manage customer service concerns. Some companies even have multiple Twitter accounts for addressing customer service issues. Bonus tip: when sharing specifics or personal customer data, it is better to interact with customers via Direct Message (DM).

Why is this a good idea? In addition to improving a subscriber’s experience, using Twitter as a customer service tool saves money. According to Forbes, the average cost of a Twitter response is $1, versus the cost of interacting with a customer through a call center which is $6.

A word of caution: If you use Twitter in this way, set expectations such as hours of availability in your profile, and make sure you meet or beat those standards. This will let customers know what to expect in terms of a response, and when you meet or beat that time line, you have the opportunity to impress subscribers and nonsubscribers that you follow through and that you care about your customers’ needs.

Here Spotify responds to reports of problems with the streaming music service. As soon as things returned to normal, they posted an update.

In another example, Jukely interacted directly with a subscriber who tweeted a question about waitlist options on their +1 plan.

 

8. Ask your customers for their support on Twitter or to respond to a call to action like signing up for a newsletter. Microsoft isn’t shy. In this tweet, they ask for followers to vote for them to make them GeekWire’s App of the Year.

9. Engage directly with your followers by thanking them for their retweets, likes and mentions. You can also thank event sponsors and partners to share the social media love. This takes very little time, but it can pay off big in terms of goodwill.

 

 

10. Share timeless “evergreen” content that will always be relevant to your subscribers, including famous quotes, popular video and clips, GIFs, how to guides, checklists and more. Here Hulu reminds followers that Sunday is a great day for binge watching old favorites like Seinfeld.

11. Periodically repost popular tweets, blogs and articles. We know that Twitter has a short shelf life, so we repost our newest blogs a dozen or so times over the course of the next month. That way followers who missed it the first time around might see it in a subsequent tweet. Some mark their reposts “ICYMI” (in case you missed it), like this one from Variety.

 

12. Branding, branding, branding. ‘Nuff said. Here are examples from two subscription startups who’ve had good success showcasing their brands on Twitter.

    

 

13. Use Twitter hashtags to become discoverable by nonfollowers and nonsubscribers. They may not follower your Twitter feed, but if they search by hashtag, they may find you! We like using #subscription, #subscriptionbox, #OTT, #SVOD and #SaaS to identify some of our tweets.

Hashtags are particularly useful for events (#2016Oscars), breaking news (#breakingnews) and branding (#OITNB and #RAW). Bonus tip: don’t use more than 2 or 3 hashtags. In this example, Netflix’s “Orange is the New Black” benefits from someone using the #OITNB hashtag. 

 

 

 

Here’s another fun example of the use of hashtags that many subscription box companies are using. The companies reward subscribers for sharing photos of their monthly box on social media. Here’s what’s in the April 2016 Glossybox (#glossybox).

14. Share the attention. While Twitter is a great marketing tool, it is important to remember that it is not all about you or your subscription company. It is OK to share promotional material, but it is even better to share the Twitter love with retweets and by liking the tweets of others. We like to share subscription news from other outlets. They don’t have to be our posts to be worthy. In this sequence of tweets, two of these posts are about or from Subscription Insider (the 1^st and 3^rd) and the others are from other outlets.

 

15. Have a little fun. Social media is a wonderful way to interact one on one with your audience, and people like to do business with companies and people they like, so have a little fun with your tweets. Show your personality and who and what you’re about. Here Netflix has fun with the newest season of “The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” while interacting with a follower, offering Kimmy’s own advice as a solution to a grueling wait.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And Pandora celebrates Panic at the Disco’s Brendon Urie…a fun excuse to tag the band and post a GIF. Everyone loves a good GIF, right?

We love using Twitter as a marketing tool. It’s fun, free (except for sponsored posts) and easy to use. It lets us show our subject matter expertise, share our own content as well as content from others, and it allows us to interact one on one with fans and followers we might never meet face to face. When used the right way, Twitter can be a great complement to other tools in your social media toolkit. We can’t live without it.

Tell us how Twitter helps you promote YOUR subscription business! We’d love to learn from your examples.

Coming soon: Instagram Tips and Tricks to Promote Your Subscription Business!

 

Sources:

Internet Live Stats, http://www.internetlivestats.com/twitter-statistics/

Expanded Ramblings, http://expandedramblings.com/index.php/march-2013-by-the-numbers-a-few-amazing-twitter-stats/2/

Forbes, How to Use Twitter for Customer Service, http://www.forbes.com/sites/shephyken/2016/04/30/how-to-use-twitter-for-customer-service/#125c10ec4714