Fan Appz provided more tools for digital marketers Wednesday when it added a suite of Twitter features to its real-time customer feedback platform.
The new features help brands interact with followers by running polls, hashtag games and loyalty-based reward activities on the social network. Those interactions can help build a brand’s database and connect the dots in consumer profiles, according to the company.
Fan Appz was originally developed to solve a business problem. “From a marketer’s perspective, the world has become increasingly complicated,” Fan Appz Founder and CEO Jon Siegal told CRM Buyer. The platform helps reduce channel complexity so brands can send the right communications to consumers.
Brands can use Fan Appz to build consumer profiles, then target those consumers though posts, activities and advertisements. The new features include a dashboard interface that lets brands run polls or play games using hashtags to tie responses together.
An example from the company: A brand asks the question, “What is the most important feature in a smartphone?” with the hashtags #batterylife, #screensize, and #cameraquality for user responses. The Fan Appz system, which is CRM-based, tracks the responses and adds them to customer profiles.
Hashtag Advertising
Brands are then able to advertise on Twitter and other platforms. The Twitter suite take advantage of the social network’s new ad targeting that lets brands advertise based on keywords, not just hashtags and gender.
“We can help create a landscape of hashtags where we understand the context,” Siegal said, “and turn around and put that into keyword targeting.”
The platform helps brands advertise on other social media platforms or websites by using the data it gains from polls and Twitter activity.
“One of the ways it helps with the Twitter-based advertising is it creates a landscape of hashtags that are relevant to your business and can be targeted for marketing purposes,” said Siegal. The platform is “helping clients create and generate a landscape of keywords.”
Social Brand Activity
While the activities help build a database on the back end, polls and other activities help build relationships with consumers through interactions.
“Everything we do is proactively asking people to participate,” said Siegel. “If you participate, you are sharing intent.”
Brands can use the data to contact users on other channels, such as on Facebook or email, but only if they have that permission, he added.
From a social perspective, interaction on Twitter is good for a brand. “It’s definitely successful, especially if you use a specific hashtag for an event. It gives people a way to connect on one hand, and also gives the person running the event the ability to track results,” said Lauren Schneider, social media coordinator at Ingenex Digital Marketing.
“Asking a question is always a good thing because it gives [Twitter followers] a call to action,” Schneider told CRM Buyer.
The key is not to go crazy with hashtags. “We suggest never using more than two or three, and they should always have a purpose,” Schneider said. Ingenex often uses hashtags such as #marketing, #socialmedia and other keywords related to the social marketing and advertising space when tweeting about the agency.
Questions posed to consumers still have to have relevance to the brand, however, as well as add to the conversation.
“You still have to do things that are interesting and not annoying,” Rob Enderle, principal analyst at Enderle Group told CRM Buyer. “You find out about existing customers and potential customers. This is a good way to use a social media network for a professional purpose.”
The dashboard helps compile results of polls, and gives instant feedback to brands, he added. “The nice thing about Twitter is you can get real-time results, and fairly early in the campaign.”
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