Push and pull approaches to using Twitter as a marketing tool

Most large companies now use social media platforms for a range of purposes and with varying results. At the heart of many of these efforts is the objective of influencing consumer behaviour. However, the success of these initiatives is very patchy in terms of raising brand awareness and driving sales. This is partly due to the relative novelty of such platforms but also because engaging with customers and prospects in these interactive environments presents new challenges to companies which they did not face with traditional marketing approaches based on a broadcast model of information flows. This paper considers the efforts of the largest 50 UK retail groups and their use of Twitter to promote their retail brands. The research goes beyond simply counting Twitter followers and volumes of tweets as indicators of effectiveness and utilises social authority scoring from the digital marketing analysts, Moz to present a more nuanced analysis of their Twitter activity. The data is examined within the context of the 3-M framework to evaluate the different approaches adopted by the retail brands. The principal contributions of this research are to provide a quantitative method for testing the 3-M framework across company groupings as well as showing the applicability of the model to the UK retail sector.