Barterzone Hooks It On Twitter

Barterzone Hooks It On Twitter

When BarterZone NZ launched it’s all new look barter programme at the beginning of October, they decided to take a punt on doing this using the social media platform Twitter.

With what some would say was a sales pitch, they tweeted about their launch, the free membership, that anyone can join and of course their $100,000 BarterZone Trade Dollar Giveaway.

Patrick Howard (CEO BarterZone) said “The first day we had attracted over 25 new members, the next day saw similar numbers joining, and over the course of the launch more than 180 people had joined.

“We had no preconceived ideas as to the impact Twitter would have on enquiries or the number of people joining; we went into this knowing that it was pretty much an uncharted territory for such a launch, but with the wide range of people using social media sites like Twitter we thought it was a gamble worth taking.”

Initially BarterZone was using the site to promote its memberships using messages like “At BarterZone we do things differently - we offer barter to individuals not just business. www.barterzone.co.nz” and “We’ve just launched a special promotion – when you join and refer friends you are in the draw to win $100,000 BarterZone Trade Dollars www.barterzone.co.nz”.

BarterZone have more plans for the future and will be maintaining their social media presence, including announcing some new and exciting activities planned for 2010, and will continue using twitter and FaceBook becoming part of the online community, joining in the conversation, listening and sharing.

Patrick Howard sees that in being visible will open the company to what could be challenging questions, disparaging comments and the like; but it is this too that has attracted the company to use such sites as Twitter.

“Being able to ‘talk’ with our customers, members and the community is important we want to hear what people have to say, and want to be able to help people understand how barter programmes work; but more than that we want to be open and part of the wider community.” said Howard.

People are now looking at how to calculate ROI when using social media, BarterZone wanted to know what their return would translate into; so when they launched they set about monitoring what was happening, the table below shows data collated.

Twitter days 28
(1)Hours per day 2.25
Total hours 63.0
New members 187
New members per hour 2.97
Web traffic (avg per day) 57(2)
Notes to table:
(1)Hours per day, predetermined numbers of hours per day, to tweet and ‘monitor’ any conversation about BarterZone (2) Web traffic (avg per day), No monitoring of click throughs from twitter or twitter aps.

ENDS

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