Samenvatting

This graduation assignment is aiming at finding a solution for a problem posed by Forrester Research. The company has many followers on Twitter, but they are not sure who these people are, and how to interact with them. More importantly, the company wants to know how to define its target audience, and how to interact and engage with this target audience(s) on Twitter. In order to find a solution for this problem, I first conducted an extensive literature review to find what has been done already to solve similar problems. The literature review starts with the very basic concepts of social media networks and web 2.0, and how they can be utilized in marketing strategies. Then, the literature review explores the benefits and implications of using social media platforms, namely, generating awareness, sales and therefore revenue. The literature review goes on to trying to define what social media engagement is, and what are the tools available to measure it. There are traditional ways to measure engagement, such as conversation rates, and there are also software that allows marketers to monitor activities on social media, create a better ground for engaging with it and control a company’s social media efforts in one interface. However, it turns out that while there are many automated tools to monitor social media activities and measure the engagement they generate, there is a need for a human-based analysis of the target audience(s) and their activities, particularly on Twitter. In order to generate more engagement, there are a few techniques a company can employ, for example, using hashtags to create conversations and paying for a promoted Twitter account of posts. One of the main of the main research questions of this assignment is who is/are the target audience(s) of Forrester Research on Twitter. The literature review explains what target audience segmentation is, and how it should be done on social media platforms and specifically on Twitter. There are several ways to define what kind of people a company should interact with, and the conclusion is that Forrester Research should aim to interact with social influencers as well as brand enthusiast. Prior to conducting my own case study, I looked into other case studies wherein companies had problems similar to the one Forrester Research is facing, and how these companies dealt with them. These case studies are summarized in the literature review in order to emphasize what has already been done. This part is followed by an explanation of the limitations and restrictions of my research, with the main ones being time restriction, as the research needs to be done manually, and the problematic definition of engagement and the fact that there is no one clear way to measure it. Then, the methodology of this research is explained in detail. I used a case study method to research the company’s environment, analysis how well its competitors are doing on social media, and how well the company itself was doing prior to the implementation of a pilot project, using framework from the company itself, online tools and interviews with the PR director and a Forrester Research analyst. The main goal for the pilot project was to create lists of people the company want to engage with, and thereafter start an engagement process, firstly just retweeting those influencers’ posts and then interacting with them via conversations on Twitter. We created influencer lists based on the company’s criteria as well as their understanding of who would be influential and who they would want to advocate for the company. After the pilot project had begun, I conducted a content analysis to see what posts people are more inclined to interact with. The content analysis revealed that people are more likely to engage with posts that are containing data points from research conducted by the company, and posts contacting links media such as pictures and videos. The case study and all it research components are then summarized in the conclusion part, which leads to the most important part of this assignment – the advice. My main advice for Forrester Research is to not just focus on social influencers, but also approach brand enthusiasts. Therefore, the advice is to adjust the influencer lists that we have created, and add to them the people who engage with the company’s posts the most. Furthermore, I advise the company to use hashtags in their posts in order to create a conversation with its followers, and post tweets with data points and pictures or videos including data points from reports, as the content analysis showed that this is what attracts people. In order to measure how well this engagement strategy is working, I advise the company to run engagement percentage calculations once a month to see if there are changes in the amount of followers, and the amount of interactions they have with the company’s posts. Because this is a time-consuming process, I advise the company to hire an experienced, trained staff that will focus on this assignment solely. Lastly, I urge the PR team to collaborate with the other departments in the company, in order to implement this engagement strategy, and to share the knowledge that is available in the company, in all levels of the organizations, whether they are dealing with clients, the media or other stakeholders on social media.