Prestwick House has been providing useful information and quality products to English teachers since 1983. How do I know that? I've seen the proof on Twitter!
Twitter has not been around for a very long time, and despite the phenomenal growth in its appeal as a marketing tool, it's pretty clear not many education-oriented companies have learned how to effectively utilise it yet.
They're all there of course - on Twitter. I follow many publishers big and small on Twitter, and generally speaking to date I've found their performance there to be pretty ordinary. I get all the announcements about their new publications and products. I get all their plugs about conference appearances and special offers.
But I don't think many publishers actually "get" Twitter. Not yet, anyway.
Prestwick House (@prestwickhouse), a smaller publisher of English teaching materials based in the UK, is a sterling example of a company that has got it right - in my opinion, anyway.
Introductions are important in any field of business, and Prestwick House's public Twitter page does it superbly:
Short summary of what the business is and does, but the clincher is the bit at the end:
Annie tweeting.
Beyond the company logo and description, we have an actual person here. A person tweeting, a person we can communicate with.
It's instantly more personal (or personable, I should say), and therefore more appealing to someone like me.
But intros and presentation aside, it's what Annie (as the Twitter "face" of Prestwick House) is actually doing with Twitter that really sets a powerful example of how to get the best out of this form of social media.
I already mentioned that, with other publishers, I get all the product updates, the offers, the announcements about events being sponsored or participated in by that publisher. It's just tweet after tweet of advertising, basically. It goes in one side of my monitor and out the other (so to speak) in less time than it takes me to think, "Hell, I hate blanket advertising."
When you take a look at Prestwick House's twitterstream, however, you will see something different.
Annie reads other people's tweets. She responds to them, and retweets them. She adds comments. She engages people with the occasional friendly banter (and it's not contrived - it's genuine). She posts a lot of tweets with links to resources and news that are not directly related to her company, but are certainly highly relevant to the general field of education in which her company is an active player. She also connects with people on Twitter to invite them to contribute guest blog posts on the Prestwick House website. These are not posts reviewing Prestwick House products - they are posts of potentially high interest value to the field in general.
Annie (and Prestwick House of course) are doing something really important here. They are not using Twitter to try to directly sell to a target market. They are using Twitter to communicate with their market, get to know it better, and actually participate in its activities and momentum in a social media setting.
I think those are really crucial words in understanding what makes Twitter tick:
Communicate. Get to know. Participate.
If some of the major publishers out there are wondering why a smaller publisher like Prestwick House has close to double the number of followers that they do (a quick calculation I did by comparing PH's follower count to some of the "big boys" out there), it could be worth taking a closer look at what they tweet, why they tweet it, and "who" is actually tweeting it.
It's not a matter of people not getting your tweets, publishers.
It's a matter of you not really getting Twitter. Not yet, anyway!
:-)
