Best 12 Tips for Successful Corporate Twittering
1. Reserve a good, relevant username. With only 15 characters or fewer to
play with, and with, oh, about 106 million users earlier to the party, your
most urgent task is to come up with a short, memorable, recognizable,
intuitive Twitter handle: as close to @YourBusiness as you can get.
2. Display a human face for your business . I generally think the handle
of your business Twitter account should be the name of your company,
although others prefer names like @Jill_atCompany to humanize the
account and to allow several people to tweet for a single company, an
ideal approach for large fi rms. I like the example of @Rubbermaid,
“currently tweeted by Jim Deitzel”—this approach is an ideal way to
have your cake and eat it, too. You get the recognizable handle. You get
the face behind the logo—the personality of the specifi c human being
doing the tweeting. And if the staff member should, at some point, move
on to a different role or a different company, the account can be “cur-
rently tweeted” by some new person, without disruption to the brand.
3. Establish your specialty . When I said you need an elevator pitch, I
meant you need an area of focus, a specialty and a perspective that ’ s eas-
ily expressed in just a few words. Your focus should be on benefi ts, not
products. Sizzle, not steak. Your Twitter feed—indeed, all your social-
media efforts—should ride the coattails of a bigger, more passionate
lifestyle and social mission represented by the market you serve. Imag-
ine you ’ re writing little items for a fascinating lifestyle magazine in your
niche. @organic_valley, a Wisconsin cooperative of 1,300 organic fam-
ily farms, is not just hawking the products made by its farmers—it ’ s
sounding off on a wide range of topics related to world hunger, nutrition,
deforestation, the impact of pesticides, bioengineering, and more.
4. Post frequently . Twitter is voracious. It demands at least daily post-
ings to amount to anything. Keep it brief, don ’ t overthink it, but feed
it. Get into the habit. If you establish a schedule of seven posts a week
for Facebook, say, plan to come up with 15 or 20 posts a week for
Twitter. If you ’ ve done a good job of establishing your specialty above,
you can simply set up news alerts to be informed of new developments.
5. Use hot-button keywords in your industry . Heavy Twitter users troll
through Twitter search results or set up alerts to follow topics of interest
to them and the Tweeps who post about them. Keywords could be the
name of high-profi le people or celebrities, news events, companies, just
the name of your market or industry, etc. Whether it ’ s surfi ng, fat-free,
Google Analytics, knitting, Scottish—whatever your niche, people on
Twitter are searching for it daily and will follow you if you ’ re a regular
poster on it.
6. Use popular hash tags, and promote your own . A hash tag is a sin-
gle, concatenated string prefaced with the # sign used to make it easier
to fi nd all tweets on a given topic or event. On the day of the Indy 500
auto race, the Twitterers at Indianapolis Motor Speedway pushed to
get #indy500 to the top of the trending topics. Whether your topic or
event is global in scope, or a niche business conference, giving it an
easy-to-remember hash tag is key to helping your audience to stay in
the loop.
7. Follow! It ’ s not enough just to post and hope for the best. You ’ ve got
to actively build a network on Twitter, and the best way to have people
notice what you ’ re doing is to take notice of them. Search for members
posting on your topics of interest and follow them. Look at their own
followers and select relevant folks to follow. Keep a focused network
that aligns with your “elevator pitch” or area of specialty. When you
follow people on Twitter, they ’ ll generally follow you back.
8. Recognize your followers . When people follow you, take a moment to
check them out. Some will be blank-slate newbies or evident spam art-
ists, whom you can ignore. But when real people with an interesting
stream of tweets follow you, follow them back. Send them a friendly
direct-message thanking them for the follow and looking forward to
getting to know one another. Maybe nothing will come of it—Twitter
is the least reciprocal of the social-media platforms—but it ’ s good
form, and you never know what will come of these connections. For
instance, Paul Kalemkiarian, owner of the Wine of the Month Club,
reached out to one of his Twitter followers who ran a comparison Web
site and they established a business relationship—and she ended up
sending him $100,000 of holiday season business.
9. Promote . Give the Twitter icon prominent real estate on your Web
site. Display the current feed widget on your home page. Pitch the
Twitter feed in your e-mail newsletter, and maybe even your catalog or
other print media.
10. Retweet . Be listening for references to your brand, and when people
say something nice about you, retweet it. And also send a DM to thank
them. Retweeting the good word is an easy, effective, daily discipline
you should get into—it ’ s a great way to spread any good buzz enjoyed
by your brand, and it ’ s unique to Twitter.
11. Ask for retweets . This can be a little crass, but if handled tongue in
cheek or for a good cause, it can really spread the word. Example: Rid-
ing a wave of popularity for its Shape-Up fi tness shoes, the Skechers
shoe brand asked its followers “Retweet if you love your Shape-Ups!”
This simple effort resulted in scores of positive, authentic, brand-
building tweets, just for the asking.
12. Attend or host a Tweetup . One of the coolest elements of the surge in
online social networking is that it hasn ’ t turned us all into lonely, iso-
lated mouse potatoes. Twitter fans have popularized the Tweetup, an
in-person get-together of related Twitter users. For the most outgoing
and connected among us, online social media is just a tool and a facili-
tator for the kind of personal and business networking that even your
grandmother would recognize. Today there are more opportunities than
ever to identify like-minded people in your vicinity—or those attend-
ing the same event as you—who are interested not just in exchanging
Tweets, but in getting together in person, for drinks, a meal, a meeting,
a hike or bike ride, a street protest, performance art, you name it. When
the social connection deepens through in-person meeting, you ’ re really
taking the fullest advantage of social media ’ s rich potential.
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