For Brands on Twitter, Quizzes Win New Followers

Indonesians are very talkative on Twitter. According to SalingSaling, a social media metrics company, their tweets reach 15% of the world’s population, ranking just below Brazil (27%) and America (25%). And with 19% of its 240 million population using Twitter, many brand owners have started to join in this virtual conversation in order to build their online reputations or promote their products or services.

How exactly they do that? From my observations, quizzes can be key. Once you pop a gift-rewarded-question, new followers swarm to your account.

A Look at Soyjoy

@soyjoyID on Twitter

One of the pioneers of the Twitter quiz is Soyjoy (@soyjoyID). Otsuka Indonesia, the owner of Soyjoy, has successfully introduced Its healthy snack to many customers through the microblog platform. Many Twitter users are actively involved in a conversation about health, food, and lifestyle with a different hashtag that changes everyday.

In addition to engaging customers in conversation, the @soyjoyID Twitter account has also served as a medium to drive people to its website. And a quiz a powerful tool to do that. This year the company’s quiz “Guess the Winner & Win an iPad!” was an important part of its Healthylicious 2 campaign — an online reality show to choose two people who live healthy with Soyjoy.

Last year the quiz and the campaign gained huge popularity among young people. Today @soyjoyID has more than 6.200 followers. Soyjoy has been accepted by the market faster — it only took about a year — than Otsuka’s previous product, according to R. Suhendar, Product Marketing Manager at Otsuka Indonesia (Businessweek interview, print edition).

All the campaigns, quizzes, and even @soyjoyID tweets were professionally handled by a joint team from Otsuka and Virtual Consulting. This team works hand-in-hand to deliver a long-term engagement strategy to their online customers. They’ve made their followers into brand guardians who “work” as their ambassadors.

Plan Ahead

Fail to plan, plan to fail

Unfortunately, some brand owners don’t implement a long term strategy. They go straight to quizzes on Twitter without planning how to maintain their followers. Some companies just want to gain as many followers as they can, building a wider audience for their tweets. They don’t realize their efforts could backfire if attention is not paid to to building a brand image.

Of course each brand owner has its own goal when deciding how to use social media platforms like Twitter. If you want to use quizzes as a shortcut to gain followers in the short term, you’ll probably succeed in getting some. But without any further strategy to engage them, you’ll lose them just as fast as they came.