Social Media: Twitter For Business

This is a straight forward guide for how businesses can successfully leverage Twitter.  I have a lot more detail in a presentation deck, so if you are interested shoot me an email.  This information comes mostly from three fortune 500 social initiatives I have worked closely on.  Let’s dive right in…

Sign up and listen. Opening an account is self explanatory.  Once in, start by listening, and resist the urge to spew your company’s greatness.  Through Twitter search, choose the topics you want to ‘listen’ to, and then sign up for those RSS feeds…Twitter will keep you updated with any words and/or phrases you want to follow.  Dell, for example, might pull these different RSS feeds: Dell, Dells, #Dell, laptop and computer (more on # later).

Speak as a person, not a logo. Make sure you have someone constantly monitoring your feeds.  If someone mentions your brand, reach out to them and start a dialogue right away…the sooner the better!  As the movement suggests – BE SOCIAL…it is easy to forget and play the marketing buffoon.  Answer questions and solve people’s problems, but also get to know your users – it’s ok to ask them about their family, hobbies and job…it’s ok to move off script.  If you show them something other than the corporate robot you will prosper.  Corporate policies tend to dehumanize a brand’s one-on-one communication…a proper Tweet exchange turns that on its head!  The Sprint Twitter rep. has a picture of him and his dog as a thumbnail and talks about journals, local events and food…very human, very real…not all business all the time…and it works really well.

How to respond. There are several ways you can respond to people through Twitter.  If you find someone’s comment through your RSS feed and they are not following you, then you want to follow them and send an @reply in response to their tweet (by following them, they are more likely to follow you back).  This response will be seen by all of your follows.  Normally you want this public openness because it is good for people to see that you are helping others and adding value.  In addition, your reply might help others.  If you want to send a direct message, which is private, the person needs to be following you.

Customer service. Twitter is a great marketing tool as long as you don’t market with it.  If you help someone that has 2,000 followers, and they @reply with “Thank you”, you just had a real person saying good things about you in front of 2,000 follows that are interested in what that person has to say…that’s better than any traditional marking **blah** that companies focus endlessly on!  If you say you can help someone, make sure you back it up.  Case in point…if Sprint can’t help me through Twitter, they give my information to a VIP customer service agent and has them contact me with a personal call.  Remember that your customers, while in ‘social’ spaces, have megaphones permanently strapped to their mouths, and whether good or bad, they are going to talk about you through their networks.  You want to make sure you are ‘always on’ and able to take quick action.  You can’t go on vacation for two weeks and walk away from your community…the voice of the company needs to stay active.  If you are always on and respond quickly with value, your brand advocacy index will shoot through the roof, and that’s a good thing!

Establish some level of governance. You need to have a clear understanding of how you want to talk to your group of followers.  What you do will depend on the comfort level of your organization.  You can establish a solid set of rules and regulations around types of communication, tone of voice, outreach, etc. or you can rely more on common sense and provide a simple set of guidelines for those who use Twitter in the organization.  Governance becomes most important when addressing negative tweets.  With negativity, you never want to ‘get into it’ with users…it’s better to stay calm and resolve their issues while taking the highroad.  As a brand, if you get into a tweet argument with a user, you will almost always do your brand more harm than good.

Here is an example of a tweet I sent about how Cash4Gold was ripping people off:

Cash4Gold got back to me right away and they were very professional with a reply stating their side of the story:

This was very helpful, open and professional…an experience that altered my impression of the brand right on the spot.

What you say doesn’t go away. Search engines, Like Google, Yahoo and MSN, crawl all of your tweets and index them.  Everything you say is public record and will show up in general search results across all browsers…this can help or hurt you, and that’s largely up to you.

Marketing your message. Wow…did I just say that!  I did, and yes, you need to be VERY CAREFUL here.  As I said, if you push market to people, they will turn you off and tell others to do the same.  If you push anything out to your followers, make sure it is something that makes them want to engage, learn and come back for more.  Here is an example from Doubletree that misses the mark:

Who cares!  Testimonials, no matter how grand they appear in corporate eyes, are usually viewed as a waste of time and an invasion of people’s ‘social’ space.

Taking a different approach, this Doubletree post does a much better job living within the ‘social’ fabric:

For starters, Doubletree is replying to someone and saying thank you.  The link to the blog post was not re-posted – this shows confidence and restraint.  “…love your jewelry!’ is perfect…it takes the corporate out of Doubletree and makes them human as they took time to look at this person’s site and comment on something personal…that’s conversation, and that’s good ‘non-marketing’.

Open the ‘brand’ door. Again, instead of marketing out, open your doors and invite people in.  People who are interested in your brand follow you…they are a great focus group, so why not ask for their advice.  Say a car company is picking a new color for a car…they can open the door a little and ask for suggests on what the name of the color should be, or the can pry the door open a little more and let the users actually pick which color they think would work best.  It’s simple…if your company ever has a decision that the group can add value to, open it up to your followers.  They will feel like part of the team and develop a stronger brand loyalty.

No conquesting. Don’t try to conquest your competitor’s users on Twitter.  Say you are Nike…you do not want to go after people who are talking about Adidas.  Even if they are having a problem with Adidas, stay away…that’s getting up in the grill of others and will backfire as being too agressive.  If someone asks a question about what shoes to get Nikes or Adidas, then a simple reply with a comment about your shoes, or a 3rd party link explaining your position.  Be careful, because most users in this situation want to hear from other customers, and not you.

The automated direct message. You can set up an automated direct message that gets sent to anyone that signs up to follow you.  DON’T USE THIS!!  If you want to reach out to those who start following you, make it a personal message…not the generic one size fits all.  I just went through my last 100 direct messages, and 92 of them contain the words ‘thanks for following’…ouch!  That is hollow at best and there is nothing ‘social’ about it.  Chris Brogan takes it a step further here: Chris Brogan on Direct Messages.  The best approach is to stay on top of who is following you…check out their posts, look at their blog, and make a personal connection with a direct message that means something.

When to follow someone. You will often see people go out and follow hunderds of people in hopes that those people will follow you back.  DON’T DO THIS EITHER!  You want people that count and mean something to your brand.  As you monitor the Twitterscape for conversations that mention your brand, go ahead and follow those people as mentioned above.  Once following, shoot them a message that adds value.  Keep in mind that if two people are following each other, they can send direct messages back and forth.  This could benefit your brand if users contact you directly to air their dirty laundry instead of posting it for all of their followers to see.

Encourage ‘re-tweets’ If you post content that is helpful, it will get re-tweeted (RT) and shared with others.  Once that happens, a whole new set of eyes have exposure to your content…and if they like what they see, they will start following you.

Ask questions. Very simple, but also very helpful in getting good feedback from your followers.  If you keep the questions high value, people will share.

Using Hashtags (#). You might have seen hashtags (#) used in Tweets.  The # allows people to follow topics instead of people.  If you wanted to follow Superbowl commentary during the game through Twitter, you would do so by simply tracking #superbowl.  If your brand has topics of importance, it would be smart to track those hashtags or create them yourself.  Doubletree for example created #DTcookies to keep those who love their cookies informed.  Hashtags can also help you announce new products and keep people abreast to company current events.   Hashtags are also great for your SEO ranking, so think of the key value terms you want to focus on.

Other channels. Let people know you are on Twitter and that there is value in that.  Make sure your Twitter link is on your homepage, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube Channel, etc.  Make it easy for people to join the conversation.  You can grab the Twitter logo here: http://www.epicchange.org/img/logo_twitter2.jpg

This post is already way to long, so if you need the very basics in getting started with Twitter, Jerimiah Owyang shares this post that provides solid information and other links on starting up: Link to Jeremiah Owyang’s post

If you know of a compay that could use this, pass it on…