Twitter, the 140 character micro-blogging platform, is all the rage among social media lovers. Using Twitter and a range of ancillary services, businesses of all sizes are quickly disseminating and responding to information and misinformation, sharing special offers, recognizing employees, recruiting new workers, responding to crises, and joining the conversation with naysayers and lovers of their products and services.
Are you new to Twitter? Take a look at this short informative video “Twitter in Plain English” to learn more.
As the Mashable Guide to Twitter explains “As a Twitter user you can post updates, follow and view updates from other users and send a public reply or private direct message to connect with another Twitterer.”
Tweets (the name of the 140 character message) are proliferating and impacting businesses both positively and negatively as consumers generate a wide range of messages and questions from smartphones, Wi-Fi enabled netbooks/laptops or broadband connected desktops at homes or in offices. These tweets can be mined for trends, opportunities, problems; and by adding your own tweets you can join the conversation to support your corporate, marketing, communications and customer service strategies.
If you haven’t discovered Twitter yet, the only way to appreciate what it does is to jump in and set up a Twitter account so that you begin down the path of making sure that your company is ready to use the service. Make sure to select your company name or other brand identifier as your Twitter feed address before someone else “hijacks” the name.
Local Use of Twitter
I was curious to see what a sample of local organizations were doing with Twitter including their main Twitter address, how many followers they had, how many other feeds they were following, how many tweets they had generated since starting with Twitter and whether they had customized the background of their Twitter feeds to help support their brand. In conducting my mini-audit, here’s what I found:
National and International Organizations
Organization: Promega
Twitter URL:http://twitter.com/promega
Followers/Following: 55/241
Tweets: 38
Branded Background: No
Last Tweet: August 4, 2009
Promega Tweet Example:
Organization: American Family Insurance
Twitter URL:http://twitter.com/amfam
Followers/Following: 175/0
Tweets: 1,278
Branded Background: No
Last Tweet: July 3, 2009
Organization: Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board
Twitter URL:http://twitter.com/WisCheese
Followers/Following: 1893/1811
Tweets: 324
Branded Background: No
Last Tweet: August 3, 2009
Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board Twitter Bio:
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Local Companies
Organization: Jon Lancaster Toyota
Twitter URL:http://twitter.com/WeSellToyotas
Followers/Following: 228/181
Tweets: 423
Branded Background: Yes
Last Tweet: August 2, 2009
Branded Background Example:
Organization: Liberty Towing
Twitter URL:http://twitter.com/LibertyTowing
Followers/Following: 516/178
Tweets: 39
Branded Background: No
Last Tweet: July 31, 2009
Organization: Planet Propaganda
Twitter URL:http://twitter.com/plntprpgnda
Followers/Following: 268/293
Tweets: 228
Branded Background: Yes
Last Tweet: August 4, 2009
Organization: UW Health
Twitter URL:http://twitter.com/uwhealth
Followers/Following: 92/2293
Tweets: 260
Branded Background: No
Last Tweet: August 3, 2009
Organization: Union Theater
Twitter URL:http://twitter.com/UnionTheater
Followers/Following: 1990/1186
Tweets: 201
Branded Background: Yes
Last Tweet: August 3, 2009
Next Steps in Using Twitter
- Determine your Twitter strategy.
If you’re a larger company, consider multiple Twitter feeds to serve different conversational needs and interests — special offers, president chats, customer service, jobs (see TDS), business milestones, new products, new hires, history, industry insights, customer service responses, etc. Develop a list and examples of tweets that you’ll be generating to meet your selected objective.If you’re a smaller company, you can probably go with a single Twitter account. For some creative examples of how small businesses around the country are using Twitter see “Mom & Pop Operators Turn to Social Media.”
- Select an official “tweetmaster” and approved staff who can use Twitter for business purposes.
Set up Tweeting guidelines, much like you would for other public communications and conversations. Remember that if you have multiple people tweeting, you want to make sure that they are doing so appropriately and in line with your objectives and culture.
- Decide on the style for your tweets.
Go for warm, friendly and personal if possible. Remember it is a conversation.
- Make sure that you are listed in Twitter directories.
A couple to consider are Twellow — the Twitter Yellow pages and Twibs.
- Customize your Twitter background to support your overall brand strategy.
See Wisconsin Union Theater and Jon Lancaster for examples of custom backgrounds.
- Monitor what people are saying about you.
For example, Za’s Restaurant in Columbia, South Carolina; found that they were on the winning end of popular basketball coach Dawn Steeley’s tweets until she tweeted about a bad experience on July 5th letting her followers know she was never going back there again according to the State.com. Suddenly this restaurant found itself hurt by social media feedback from a powerful local celebrity.To help you track what is being said about your company or organization, you can search Twitter on keywords like your company name, competitor’s name, product and brand names etc. and use conversational monitoring tools like TweetFeel, Twendz, Monitter or Tweetbeep for an aggregation of tweets.
- Benchmark against the big boys and others in your industry.
Among national business leaders using Twitter as part of their social media strategy are Zappos (now part of Amazon) (following 403,553/ followers 1,042,854 and 1,738 tweets) and Whole Foods (following 495,113/followers 1,093,307 and 3,652 tweets).For example, in the credit union industry, a new centralized resource called CU Tweet Track has been launched to track and share Twitter best practices and feeds among credit unions around the country. CU Tweet Track is currently following and sharing information with 342 credit unions and leagues including locally-based Wisconsin Credit Union League (78 followers, 55 tweets), UW Credit Union (357 followers, no tweets) and Heartland Credit Union (244 followers, closed access to tweets). Not to be left behind in the credit union sector, Madison-based associations CUES – Credit Union Executive Society is also using Twitter (202 followers, 144 tweets) and so is CUNA – Credit Union National Association (387 followers, 135 tweets). As you can see by the number of tweets and the followers for each of these feeds, the use of Twitter in this sector is still in its infancy.
- Follow other Twitter feeds.
The more Twitter feeds that you follow, the more followers you are likely to get in return.
- Retweet (RT) the good tweets that support your business philosophy, strategies or marketing initiatives to spread and validate your message.
- Promote your Twitter feed on your Web site, your blogs, your business card, your e-mail signatures and other promotional activities.
- Read Twitter 101 and/or The Twitter Guide Book to find out more about how Twitter is and can be used in business.
- Start tweeting and try to tweet a couple of times a day and multiple times a week.
- Have fun and keep learning and trying new things with Twitter.
Interested in finding out more about e-business and marketing, including Twitter? You can follow me on Twitter @thewebchef
