Best Business Practices when using Twitter

Best Business Practices when using Twitter 

By Sarah Gaither

With over 200 million users generating well over 200 million tweets a day, keeping your company’s message in front of your audience is easier than you think.  We have complied a list of guidelines to help business' get the most out of their corporate twitter account.

1. Know What Twitter Is: Twitter is a real-time information network. What does that mean?  It means that as soon as you post something to Twitter the people online at that time are going to be the people most likely to see it. 

2. Clearly Define Your Objectives:  It is important to have clearly defined objectives.  Do you want to highlight content, spark action, or encourage awareness of an issue?  Clearly defined objectives will help your company use Twitter to meet your larger communication goals. 

3. One Voice: Many companies have two or three people in charge of attempting to run their social media platforms.  We recommend having one profile manager to be your voice.  One person in charge means that your company will have:

Regular content: This keeps your followers engaged in what you have to say.  We encourage companies to consider posting at least once a week.

A Consistent Voice: It’s hard for three people to have one consistent voice.  

Accountability: When Tweeting for a company it’s good to know who had made the comment when issues arise.

4. Engage: As with any communication from your company, engaging with your audience(s) is important. It allows you to develop relationships and communicate messages that prompt them to take action.

This means following people that have similar interest in the community, other businesses that would have interest in your product, or businesses that you have an interest in their product. 

It also means actively re-tweeting things that your followers have tweeted that you think your followers would have an interest in. 

Consider holding twitter events.  Twitter events encourage followers to participate in conversations about your priority topics. 

5. Keep Your Content Short and Simple: Even though you have 140 characters to get your message across, we recommend only using 120 of them.  This allows room for your followers to re-tweet and, quote the tweet without having to edit it! 

6. Conduct Promotion Activities: Ongoing promotion of your Twitter profile is strongly recommended.  Promotion Tips Include: 

Cross-Promote on other social media and web channels.  For example, use your Twitter page to promote your Facebook page and vice versa.

Consider Twitter advertising to increase the number of Twitter followers. Before committing to any advertising consider your budget, target audience, and objective before beginning a Twitter advertising initiative.

7. Don’t Forget The Goal: The step that even the best social networking companies forget, is to set a goal and then evaluate your process and progress every few months.  Having that goal allows you to see if the efforts that you are making are proving to be fruitful.  If they are, that’s great.  If not, you can adjust.