Not all cause marketing tweets are created equal, but these 3 strategies helped top book publishers.
You’re a book publishing company getting traction on Twitter. Post engagements and audience reach levels are at their highest.
One day, it suddenly flops.
The post that caused it? A cause marketing tweet you thought was good. But your audience didn’t think so.
According to Mailchimp and Brafton, consumers like to know how businesses address current issues, but companies don’t want to commercialize these same issues and come off as insincere or negative. These blogs suggest avoiding monetary gifts and instead help your audience feel as if they’re helping you support the social good.
But which cause marketing tweets have been the most effective online, especially if you’re a book publishing company?
I went to Twitter and researched which tweets got the most engagement for supporting the cause Hispanic Heritage Month. Though this isn’t a nonprofit organization, it’s a social campaign and thus can be considered a cause that for-profit brands are highlighting.
I gathered 19 tweets about Hispanic Heritage Month from 10 book publishing houses (all publishers had at least one post in this study). I gathered recent tweets during September, but not all because the month had not ended. I categorized each tweet into a topic label that fit best, but I will only explain the topic labels that reflected the greatest audience engagement.
After categorizing the tweets, I summed up the total engagement (retweets, quote retweets, and comments) for each category. An example of this would be the topic label “Celebration Remarks” having 314 total engagements for the 6 tweets that fell under it.
Then I calculated the average engagement for each category. If we keep using the Celebration Remarks example, that would be dividing 314 by 6.
This is how I found out the best 3 ways to increase audience engagement on cause marketing tweets for book publishers.
1. Audience Interaction
When publishers invited their Twitter followers to participate online (retweeting or using hashtags) to support a cause without a call-to-action link, there was an 85.5 percent engagement per post. It seems most Twitter users prefer to support a cause by participating on Twitter and not on a third-party site.
2. Celebration Remarks
When companies plainly said they were celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month, there was a 52.3 percent engagement per post. This strategy resulted in lower average engagement than the first method’s, but this method had the highest total engagement of 314. Twitter users like seeing companies acknowledging and celebrating important matters instead of staying quiet.
3. Informational
When companies explained Hispanic Heritage Month, there was a 47.3 percent engagement per post. Some Twitter users will not know what certain causes are about, so supplying an explanation appears to increase audience engagement.
So, these are the top 3 ways to increase engagement on cause marketing tweets for book publishers. Do you agree or disagree? Maybe try your own data analysis and see if it lines up with what we found!