Here’s an interesting communications development. A major French company, and an oil company at that, pushing a video feed of its results presentation via a promoted tweet. At the time of writing, Total has had more than a million views of the video in ten hours which is amazing in pure publicity terms. Promoting corporate messaging and content over social media is a very powerful tool. We’ve been telling clients this for a while.
There are caveats though.
It can be very expensive, and you need to make sure you get the targeting right. The Total tweet was promoted to my personal twitter account which has a fair number of followers but has nothing to do with business. I wonder why they targeted me?
A million views of a CEO on the results podium is one thing, but if the million has zero interest in the content it’s a waste of time and money. Worse, a fossil fuel producer telling an untargeted twitter audience about how much money they’re making from an activity that is closely associated with environmental catastrophe is obviously risky. Just check some of the comments on the Tweet and you’ll see what I mean.
But chapeau to Total for dipping their toes in the water of paid promotion. We’re going to see a lot more of this from others; and if you’re interested do come and ask us how to do it without breaking the bank.