Twitter Strategies for Business
With more than 100 million members, and a structure designed perfectly
for the rapid spread of information, Twitter is playing a leading role
perhaps the leading role in the global transmission of news stories and
cultural trends. Twitter has notched year after year of furious growth: 752
percent in 2008, 1,385 percent in 2009, 1,105 percent in early 2010.
Quite simply, Twitter is the fastest-growing communications medium
in the history of the world. Your business should be part of the
conversation.
Defi ne Your Twitter Niche
Every Twitter account needs an “elevator pitch.” If you can ’ t concisely
describe what it is and who it ’ s for, don ’ t bother. And then stick to the
program. “I ’ m eating a bagel” isn ’ t worthwhile content for anything but a
very lame personal account.
For the e-commerce companies we work with, Facebook friends and
Twitter followers are a subset—maybe 10 percent—of their house
e-mail list. Presumably those fans are the really diehard enthusiasts, the
evangelists. It ’ s worthwhile to invest staff time on Twitter and other
social-media platforms to:
1. Remind the evangelists about your offers,
2. Give them a platform to rave publicly about your stuff, and
3. Communicate with them, in a Web 2.0-style “customer-service/PR/
shareholder relations” effort.
Twitter Makes an Excellent Listening Post
Call it “microblogging” if you will, but Twitter is a lot more than a
blog platform. It is, first and foremost, a communications platform.
It ’ s basically a public, internetworked e-mail system and SMS net-
work. If you are using Twitter simply as a podium to publish blurbs
linking to your company blog posts and press releases, you ’ re missing
the point.
Yes, you can and should use Twitter to publish short insights and news.
And it ’ s fi ne to link outside of Twitter if the item you ’ re mentioning is
longer than 140 characters.
But what you ’ re missing, if you focus exclusively on getting your own
word out, is the other side of the conversation. Just as in the real world, the
online social-media world stops
listening to narcissistic, self-infatuated
speakers, the sort of people who pause in their monologue only long
enough to say, “Enough about me—what do you think about me?”
Engaging in back-and-forth dialogue and spreading the word about what
others are saying are both critically important parts of the Twitter ethos.
Plus, it shows you to be generous of spirit, open-minded to what others are
talking about, and well connected.
Yet research in The Global Social Media Check-Up , 2010, by the con-
sulting and research fi rm Burson-Marsteller, indicates that too many com-
panies are doing much more talking than listening. It found:
• 82 percent of corporate Twitter accounts are tweeting company news.
• Only 38 percent are actually responding to people ’ s tweets.
• Only 32 percent are retweeting the posts of others.
IS IT A BLOG, OR IS IT E-MAIL MADE PUBLIC?
Spend any time at all in Twitterville (to borrow the homey term and you ’ ll see three fairly distinct ways to compose a post:
• Microblog posts—observations conveyed in their entirety in 140 or
fewer characters.
• Links to external pages, be they videos, longer-form blog posts or news
items, or what have you.
• Direct messages—Containing the format @username, these posts are
person-to-person messages visible not just by the recipient but by all the
followers of the sender ’ s Twitterstream.
Customer Service, One Tweet at a Time
It ’ s that last piece that is the weirdest: huge companies embracing micro
one-on-one direct messaging, in public, and I can ’ t help but think it is the
novelty of the medium. They have dived into Twitter messaging with a few
dozen customers; meanwhile, their outsourced phone centers may still
give horrendous customer service to the masses.
But obviously some companies (Zappos, for instance) embrace the Twit-
ter platform as just one part of a thoroughly good customer-service
approach, whatever the channel.
I laugh off a lot of corporate Twittering, but sometimes I reconsider:
Take Rubbermaid at http://twitter.com/Rubbermaid . They have an active
community on Twitter and Facebook built around “organization”—food
storage, closet organizing, etc.
professional organizers, etc. To me it sounds deadly boring. But if you
check it out, there are real enthusiasts out there, and Rubbermaid seems to
be building a sincere and healthy connection with them—600-some on
Facebook and 6,000-some on Twitter.
That “reach” is a tiny drop in the bucket compared to the TV and magazine
media buys they do, but I ’ ll bet Rubbermaid is doing a lot to boost the rele-
vance of their brand and also learn fi rst-hand about their best customers.
Interestingly, Rubbermaid also operates an award-winning blog, whose
positioning statement is “Adventures in Organization.” Okay, it ’ s not the
sort of material to set your pulse racing and palms sweating. But it ’ s a
charmingly tongue-in-cheek yet clear mission statement that drives:
1. The company ’ s choice of material and messaging, and
2. The customer ’ s understanding of what the brand stands for.
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