Twitter and Isobar UK have published a new research study that examines “unconscious cues” that drive brand perception on Twitter. Given the growing importance of Twitter to brand marketers, this study needs to be read by all brand marketers. The study created fictional brands to test factors that matter when consumers look at your brand on Twitter, things such as the size of the brand’s community, the voice of the brand, how it promotes, the number of followers, the number of tweets it sends out, etc. As it turns out, these unconscious cues are important: some of them have a real impact on how consumers perceive and react to a brand. And that’s to be expected — the more a brand tries to be persona having interactive communications with real people in real time, i.e., the more it acts like it’s a person, the more likely will it be reacted to as a person. So just like unconscious cues play a significant role in interpersonal communications between real people, so they play such a role in interpersonal communications with the persona/voice of a brand and real consumers. So what are some of the UC’s that make a difference. According to the study results, (1) the more followers a brand has the more it is trusted (think “celebrity” and “popularity”– my words), (2) tone is really important; when it comes to brand bios, “funny” increases likeability while “serious” increases trust (so try to be seriously funny?), but likeability doesn’t mean that consumers are more likely to buy the brand or not. And the age of the consumer also plays a role. Not unexpectedly the older the user, the less likely to purchase because of tweets. Interestingly, but again not surprisingly, overall promoted tweets scored higher than organics. The full study is available here: http://usblog.isobar.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Isobar-Twitter-White-Paper.pdf
