Studying Dell’s $1 Million Twitter Strategy

December 16th, 2008 by Nick Gonzalez

MG Siegler, over at VentureBeat, plucked a gem from an InternetNews report. Dell reports that their Twitter account has generated over $1 million in revenue over the past year and a half through sale alerts. All of this, without paying a dime for their account, or should I say accounts.

Dell actually has 19 English speaking Twitter accounts, each targeting a different community ranging from support to community to deals. At most these accounts have drawn over 7,000 followers, although likely there is some overlap. Since the article states the revenue was generated through sale alerts, DellOutlet is the account to focus on. It has over 2,000 followers. I’ve outlined the breakdown of the other accounts below.

USERNAME LINK FOLLOWERS
alienware http://twitter.com/Alienware 119
DellInsideIT http://twitter.com/DellInsideIT 133
DellChannel http://twitter.com/DellChannel 139
DellYourBlog http://twitter.com/DellYourBlog 165
Direct2Dell http://twitter.com/Direct2Dell 680
DellTechCenter http://twitter.com/DellTechCenter 124
Digital_Nomads http://twitter.com/Digital_Nomads 1,142
IdeaStorm http://twitter.com/IdeaStorm 254
IdeaStormAction http://twitter.com/IdeaStormAction 112
ReGeneration http://twitter.com/ReGeneration 281
StudioDell http://twitter.com/StudioDell 172
TeamDell http://twitter.com/TeamDell 230
DellSmallBiz http://twitter.com/DellSmallBiz 294
DellShares http://twitter.com/DellShares 83
DellintheClouds http://twitter.com/DellintheClouds 138
DellSmBizOffers http://twitter.com/DellSmBizOffers 360
DellHomeOffers http://twitter.com/DellHomeOffers 488
DellOutlet http://twitter.com/DellOutlet 2,768
TOTAL 7,682

So, while it may seem that this is a story all about the success of distributing discounts through Twitter, I’d encourage you to look a bit deeper. Just check out a search for Dell on Twitter.

This Tweet from allenmireles says it all.

“@tamar Yes..there are several different Dell reps on Twitter. If you tweet about Dell, they tend to respond fairly promptly.”

What Dell is doing right is that they’re participating within their community, as they have with several other social media initiatives. They are both appealing to value conscious consumers and building brand equity to drive value through the whole sales pipeline.

At the bottom of the funnel, Dell has DellOutlet dishing out deals. At the top of the funnel, Dell is driving a conversation with their power user customers through an integrated blogging and advertising campaign called Digital Nomads.

So here are some tips for marketing on Twitter:
Segment your audience - Dell has multiple account to improve the signal to noise ratio for their subscribers
Provide timely information - Dell alerted users of deals when they happened. When something’s new, people want to check it out.
Make something people want to share - Dell created relevant content that wasn’t just about pumping up their own brand. They gave useful advice and participated in the conversation.
Sometimes you’re not the story - Dell’s getting a lot of press for being a first mover in this area and showing some results. This is in tune with the forward thinking image the brand wants to portray.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 16th, 2008 at 5:36 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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