Twitter and Tweets are the most fascinating creation on the planet. At present there is no other place on earth to engage and reach tons of millions to draw brand credibility more powerful than Twitter. Luxury is a perception and for luxury brands Twitter presents an opportunity to target niche audiences.

Within the Twitter universe it is easier to target and find those who like $1,000 Prada Tessuto Baby Bags or searching for Christian Louboutin luxury French shoes. This is why top luxury retailers such as Net-A-Porter, Louis Vuitton, and many others are all actively using Twitter!

Every luxury brand should be Tweeting about their luxury niche. Apart from building Twitter equity, popularity, followers etc. This also helps to build EXPOSURE, endorsements and referrals that can open the door to more revenue. One key factor is that Twitter can help luxury brands establish brand awareness and credibility. Every brand will need to build these elements to sustain and overcome the recession.

One Tweet can be picked up by a leading luxury blog or top luxury magazine. Yes! media outlets are on Twitter hunting for the next big luxurious thing. For all those luxury brands who posted a Twitter follow me button on their website because everybody else was doing it, you might want to get serious now.

How can Twitter help expand the exposure of a luxury brand?

The most valuable solution that Twitter holds for luxury brands is the capacity of its audience reach. The number of Twitter followers a luxury brand has including the followers of the luxury brand followers expands the reach exposure.

Example: I have over a 15 million reach with 2000 plus followers because of the followers following the people following me. To review your reach and see how your Twitter influence ranks go to Twinfluence.

Want to know who is tweeting about luxury the best? That’s easy just go over to TwitterGrader (a system that calculate variables for grading Twitter profiles). Conduct a key search for “luxury” and receive a list of top Twitter profiles related to luxury.

http://twitter.grader.com/search?Term=luxury+

Again, it is not the number of Twitter followers that you manage to attract to your luxury brand. While followers are extremely important, it is the reach that Twitter offers that makes the exposure for your brand so powerful.

I am very interested in hearing about Twitter and luxury branding success stories. What would you like to achieve for your luxury brand using Twitter?

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.



Tweet Cloud for Luxury Brands – Using Twitter for Exposure

It’s not about you. I know, sounds cold but it’s true. It’s really not about you. It’s not about the number of followers YOU have on Twitter. It’s about how much value THEY gain from following you.

But in some ways, it’s not about them either.

In many ways it’s about your 2nd and even 3rd degree network – the folks who follow your followers.

It’s all about reach.

“But I have 7,357 followers on Twitter! Certainly that would mean that I reach more folks than my next door neighbor who has only 987 followers.”

Maybe. But maybe not.

Like my junk?

What’s powerful about Twitter is the potential for your message to be exposed to thousands of folks way beyond your immediate connections. This happens when your followers retweet something you posted or the followers of your followers (2nd degree folks) retweet something the your followers retweeted. There are a few tools that can measure this potential reach, but let’s focus on two:

1. Twinfluence

Twinfluence will show you four useful measurements of your Twitter network:

Second-Order Network: The number of folks that follow your followers. These are the folks that are exposed to replies and retweets from your followers. The more useful and/or *interesting your posts, the more likely your second-order network will retweet to their followers. Your 1st degree followers plus all their followers equals your reach.

Velocity: The average number of followers and second-order followers attracted per day is velocity. The larger your Twitter network is, the faster it grows. Again, posts that are useful and/or interesting.

Social Capital: The degree to which your followers have a high number of followers themselves determines your social capital. A user whose followers have an average of 200 followers each has a much more limited reach than another use whose followers have an average of 2,000 followers. Even if these two users have the same number of followers, their potential reach (the real story) is completely different.

Centralization: This indicates the degree to which you converse with a only a few other users. If, for example, you converse with only three users who each have 5,000 followers, your network is considered “fragile”. If one of these three users unfollows you, it could have a huge impact on your overall reach.

2. Twitter-Friends

Twitter-friends is a data geeks wet dream. A lot of very useful data that’s worth spending time understanding. For now though, start with these three measurements:

Network overlap: This graph shows you the level of two-way conversations you have with folks. As you become more “popular” on Twitter, it will be hard to tell how many replies from folks that you’ve missed. In my case, you’ll notice that the amount of incoming posts to me (@johnhaydon) is larger than my outgoing replies to folks. However, the overlap of these streams shows a fairly healthy two-way dialogue.

Conversation Quotient: This indicates the level of “spaminess”. The Twitter-Friends FAQ states, “People with a high CQ are using Twitter to have direct conversations with other users. People with a low CQ are using it more for broadcasting links or status messages.”

Retweet Quotient: This tells you how useful your junk is . And we all know that long term success with any social media is driven by sincerity and usefulness.

An understanding of your Twitter network’s strengths and weaknesses will give you a good starting point in the direction that you want to go with Twitter.

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.



Measuring Your Twitter Network’s Health

• Twitter desktop clients (I’m a fan of Twhirl and TweetDeck)
• Twitter Applications for iPhone (I’m a user of Twittelator Pro)
• Twitter user ranking services (like Twitterholic)
• Visualization tools (like TweetWheel)
• Tools to import RSS feeds to your Twitter account (I use Twitterfeed)
• Tools for setting tweets to go off later (Tweetlater)
• Metrics tool (TweetStats – Twinfluence)
• Tools for sharing pictures on Twitter (Twitpic)
• Services to tweet to groups (GroupTweet)
• Twitter Directories (Twellow)
• Tools for finding new people to follow (Twubble)
• Tools for helping you to track Twitter Conversations (Tweet2Tweet)
• Trend Tracking tools for what’s hot on Twitter (Twitscoop)
• Tools to help Twitter integrate with other applications (TwitterCal – which lets you add items to your Google calandar by Twitter)
• Services for groups to tag and organize tweets (HashTags)
• Twitter updaters (Ping.fm – which allows you to update status on multiple sites like Twitter)
• Twitter backup services (TweetTake)
• Services to let you track which links people are clicking on in your Tweets (TweetBurner)

These are just some of the tools services I’ve used in the last few weeks and they only scratch the surface at the hundreds of Twitter tools that are released.

What Twitter Tools and Services do you use? Leave the ones you love in comments below.

I’m looking forward to finding out which ones get mentioned most and finding some new ones that I’d not previously discovered.

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.



What Twitter Tools and Services Do You Use?