On Twitter, retail events and auto shows are marketing gold

New data show that retail events and auto shows are key drivers of consumer conversations on Twitter.

The research, conducted by Canvs on behalf of Twitter, found that tweets in which people consider specific makes triple during retail events such as truck month or year-end sales.

The same was true for auto shows, where consumers are bombarded with the hottest upcoming vehicles. Make-consideration tweets double during auto shows, according to the research.

Canvs, developed by Mashwork, is a platform that provides social media audience insights for TV marketers. Canvs looked at branded and unbranded car conversations that are public on Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr over 12 months.

According to Twitter, “Canvs then identified and quantified the top topics and drivers of conversation, and sorted them all into the various steps consumers take when purchasing a new car.”

The daily, real-time conversations centered on autos on Twitter are extensive.

More than 327,000 auto-related tweets are sent out daily, touching on everything from car shopping to “owning, wanting and loving cars.”

How automakers and their dealers tap into these conversations, which occur at various levels of the purchase funnel, is crucial to gaining traction on Twitter. The site suggests aligning campaigns with sales events and new-model reveals.

“Like never before, marketers have this ability to see user intent. 327,000 tweets a day about people wanting, shopping and owning; that’s an expression of intent we’ve never seen before,” Robert Pietsch, head of auto at Twitter, said in an interview Tuesday.

He added, “What advertisers and marketers are able to do with that is actually look at those signals of people saying, ‘I’m in market for a car, I’m going car shopping,’ and be able to target them with very specific messaging knowing that they’re actually in market for a car.”

And when somebody tweets they’re going car shopping, they aren’t kidding.

“Part of this research that’s so powerful is that it shows that when people express intent that they’re going shopping on Twitter, that within the next 72 hours, they’re going to make a purchase. You’ve got this really small window to influence them,” Pietsch said. “And the smart auto manufacturers are taking advantage of things like keyword targeting, picking up on those signals and being able to send direct messages to those folks in the form of a promoted tweet to actually influence that purchase.”

Pietsch added that Jaguar and Land Rover, for example, do a good job of using keyword targeting in their outreach. He said another luxury brand, Acura, has cleverly leveraged Twitter with an in-tweet configurator where people can create their own versions of the TLX sedan and share them.

While Twitter has the reputation as a millennial haven that some probably wouldn’t associate with the luxury space, Pietsch said the demographics are starting to flatten as the platform grows. Twitter has more than 300 million monthly active users.

The audience still skews younger, but Pietsch said there is an affluent, middle-age lot on Twitter that these brands can reach.

Showing off

People aren’t shy about parading their cars on Twitter once they make a purchase, either.

Each year, there are more than 2.2 million tweets with people showing off their new rides -- with 23 percent of these new-car photos including the owner in the picture.

Here are more insights from Twitter:

• Sixty percent of auto-shopping conversations on Twitter are “pre-purchase,” while 30 percent of them happen “during purchase.”
• There are more than 2.4 million “car spotting” tweets per year, 3 percent of which mention the phrase “dream car.”
• Twitter says 75 percent of auto conversations on the platform are consumer driven, meaning they aren’t coming from brands and influencers.