This post by Olsy Sorokina originally appeared on the Hootsuite blog in 3/15.
Even the best-love brands have their haters—that’s unavoidable. So for marketers, it’s often better to focus on being memorable and stand out from the crowd. Think of all those commercial jingles that just won’t get out of your head, or anticipation of products associated with the coming of a new season (Pumpkin Spice Latte, I’m looking at you). Brands that achieve this do so by straying off the beaten path. Marketing guru Seth Godin calls this “finding your purple cow,” a term inspired by a short 19th century nonsense poem and used by Godin to describe being remarkable, and succeeding in advertising by thinking outside the box.
Should you be thinking about finding your own brand’s purple cow? Finding that truly unique way of telling your story means taking risks and surprising your audience. That means the first step down the path to a more memorable bovine brand is to figure out if you’ve been boring your followers.
3 warning signs that you might be boring your followers:
1. Your Twitter engagement rate is low
Once Twitter has rolled out their analytics tools to all users, determining how well your messaging is performing on the microblogging network is easier than ever. Perhaps the most telling of all metrics available to users is the engagement rate, a number calculated based on the number of impressions (i.e. how many people saw the Tweet) and the number of engagements (link clicks, favorites, retweets, etc.) with your Tweets. Obviously, the higher the engagement rate, the better you’re doing. We experienced this ourselves when we doubled our Twitter engagement rate in two months.