Trading Technologies Twitter Ramp-Up
After a leadership change at the beginning of 2014, Trading Technologies (TT) needed to revamp not just its technology, but the way in which it interacted with its customers. Startups were beginning to attract the best tech talent away from fintech firms like TT, and the new leadership wanted better ways of communicating its values both internally and externally.
3Points had already been working with TT for years, mainly on media relations. However, 3Points saw an opportunity for TT to expand its brand into what was then a fledgling media channel, Twitter, and registered the handle @Trading_Tech. With TT’s new focus on customer communications and company culture, 3Points was tasked with taking over the company’s Twitter account, from generating content ideas to drafting tweets to execution to impact reporting.
Strategy
3Points first put in place a new, diversified content plan for the Twitter account. The goal was to emphasize Trading Technologies’ values across different “pillars,” such as industry thought leadership, platform innovations, and company culture highlights. Through August of 2016, 3Points continued to work closely with TT’s internal marketing team and led weekly meetings to develop a comprehensive editorial calendar.
3Points began incorporating social analytics as well, measuring engagement rate and impressions for every post on a weekly basis. This led to monthly meetings, in which we highlighted what worked well and what didn’t, and discussed how that information could drive strategy moving forward. Additionally, 3Points put together a strategy to analyze TT’s Twitter followers, with the goal of gaining a better understanding of who the audience was and what content appealed to them the most.
Business Impact
TT’s Twitter account saw its follower growth rate double in the three months after 3Points took over management: proof that the company’s audience and online presence was expanding. That growth continued through the rest of the year, as TT ended the year with over 3,100 followers, meaning the account gained roughly 1,300 followers in 2015, after gaining roughly 1,700 in its first 2.5 years of existence. Through the first three quarters of 2016, the account was on pace for over 1,600 new followers for the year.
TT not only gained new followers, but our analysis showed they gained high-quality, relevant followers, and we also secured a better understanding of who those followers were. 3Points categorized each of the account’s followers, dividing them into traders, media members, industry partners, etc. 3Points then put together a strategy to target new “quality followers,” i.e. accounts with a great deal of influence in the industry.
Overall, once 3Points took over account management, @Trading_Tech tweeted over 2.7 times more than it had in 2014 (1,080 tweets in 2015 compared to 398 in 2014), and that number is on pace to increase again in 2016. Despite the dramatic increase in tweets and followers — which tends to drive engagement rate down — the account kept a steady engagement rate, even increasing slightly from an average of 1.32% in 2014 to 1.4% in 2015 to 1.5% in 2016.
In 2016, TT launched its first direct-to-consumer marketing campaign that targeted professional traders, encouraging them to open a trial account for TT’s new platform. Out of all the mediums in the campaign, Twitter proved to be the most effective in growing the number of demo users.
TT now enjoys direct contact with many top traders, and when those high-quality followers engage publicly with TT, that engagement in turn encourages others to learn more about TT and its products.
Total annual
follower growth
Started May 2012
1/19/15: 1,813
1/24/16: 3,174
9/29/16: 4,266
(on pace for 4,812 by 2017)
# Tweets per year
398 tweets in 2014
1,080 tweets in 2015
990 tweets Jan-Aug 2016
(pace of 1,485 for the year)
engagement rate for the year
1.32% in 2014
1.4% in 2015
1.5% in 2016