With almost 200 million users and 6,000 tweets shared per second, Twitter offers brands plenty of opportunities to connect with their audiences — and to get lost in the noise. Despite being a well-known name among digital marketers and SEO specialists, Semrush was on a mission to elevate its presence on social media and join trending conversations to drive greater engagement with its followers.
Semrush engaged Walker Sands to act as a strategic partner in leveling up its creative expression on Twitter. While the martech provider had a standard business presence on social media, Semrush needed supplemental support to distinguish its brand from more conservative competitors, with the goal of driving a higher engagement rate and building brand affinity among its large digital marketing audience.
Over the course of three months, Walker Sands set out to design and implement a premium Twitter microcontent program for Semrush that would:
Use humor to emphasize product value
Embed the brand in timely, trending conversations
Lead with empathy, prioritizing audience interests over marketing messages
Walker Sands kicked off the program by conducting competitive research and a social listening analysis to pinpoint Semrush’s current role in industry conversations — and next to competitors — on Twitter and identify opportunities for creative exploration.
Walker Sands found that Semrush was surpassing many competitors in share of voice (SOV) at 29.1%, but that its top competitor led the industry at 64.9%. While Semrush was coming in second in SOV, Walker Sands discovered the brand was leading engagement across the industry by asking smart questions and directly engaging its audience in a dialogue.
Walker Sands also noted that Semrush’s competitors took on a practical tone on Twitter and focused on a narrow range of topics — making little effort to incite conversation or engage audiences. In comparison, Semrush was informative, friendly and interactive on Twitter. The brand had hints of a playful and personal tone, which Walker Sands believed could distinguish Semrush from competitors if explored further.
Based on these insights, the Walker Sands team recommended that Semrush differentiate itself from more conservative competitors with a distinct brand voice. The team documented an evolved verbal identity for Semrush that took on a snarky, relatable tone — matching the overarching sentiment of passionate digital marketers in industry conversations.
To activate the new voice, over the course of three months Walker Sands curated five premium microcontent tweets per week across the two below content categories:
Recurring content: Themed, Semrush-initiated content designed to demonstrate product value in amusing ways while empathizing with and entertaining its audience.
Active engagement: Organic, reactive content shared in response to brand mentions, search-related conversations and trending topics to drive audience engagement and embed the brand in timely, cultural conversations.
Every Monday morning, Walker Sands’ Social Media Strategist scanned the latest Twitter trends and social listening topics to identify popular topics for the week — from digital marketing industry trends to general topics such as new meme formats, celebrity gossip and more. Walker Sands then proposed ways in which those topics could relate back to Semrush and the most appropriate format to illustrate the brand’s value, such as leveraging the company’s platform features with a screen grab, a new meme or snarky commentary.
With these insights in hand, Walker Sands’ copywriters developed themed microcontent centered around niche industry humor and relatable digital marketing struggles to drive emotional engagement. This included recurring themes such as #StruggleSearch, which empathized with marketers turning to search in times of personal need, and “Asked + Answered,” which shared timely, relevant search queries alongside amusing brand commentary to entertain while proving product value.
In addition to the recurring content, Walker Sands produced active engagement content that enabled Semrush to react to brand mentions, comments and news. From Elon Musk’s latest tweets to trending search topics, the team kept tabs on relevant news stories and “viral moments” that Semrush could organically engage with to embed the brand in timely, cultural conversations.
Through this premium Twitter microcontent program, Walker Sands defined a new voice for Semrush’s Twitter account, which has been reflected in posts from the Semrush internal team and recognized by its audience as a successful shift. One user even tweeted, “Did you hire a new social media person?”
The strategy drove high engagement and awareness among Semrush’s target audience in the three-month timeframe, as shown through an improvement in average tweet performance before and after the program:
76 engagements : 375 engagements per tweet
3,500 impressions : 11,386 impressions per tweet
2.2% : 4.4% average engagement rate
By the end of the three months, the social program resulted in:
793,500+ total impressions
34,800+ total engagements
4.4% average engagement rate
594 total shares
With the distinguished voice and increase in overall engagement, the Twitter program ultimately introduced a human approach to Semrush’s social media strategy — enabling Semrush to eat away at the competitor share of voice by 8% and successfully improve its brand sentiment by 2% over time.
