Using Twitter in the acceleration of marketing new products and services

Abstract

The popularity of social media and microblogging services, like Twitter, has increased in a fast manner over the last couple of years.  Their use in innovation process and marketing has also gained a lot of attention. However, product and service acceleration -i.e. bringing a product or service faster to the market- with the help of social media and especially by using Twitter has not been researched much, in spite of the fact that new marketing techniques like growth hacking -which aims on low-cost and innovative alternatives to traditional marketing- have reached popularity. In this paper, we define the concept of acceleration and analyse via literature and a real-life, explorative case study, how Twitter could be used for accelerating products and services. Our case study analyses the experiences and data from four Twitter accounts created for accelerating two software applications. According to our research, Twitter has potential for product and services acceleration, but it requires taking into account many aspects and challenges that are summarized in this paper.