Twitter Best Practices

What Does it Mean to Your Organization?

First it was forums and blogs. Then came MySpace and Facebook. Now there’s Twitter, the latest social media platform to descend onto desktops and mobile handsets everywhere. Over the first half of 2009, Twitter has experienced explosive growth, driven in large part by a combination of its own power-users and a celebrity effect provided by the likes of Oprah and Ashton Kutcher. Now mainstream news outlets like CNN and the New York Times are making near-constant Twitter mentions and references related to breaking news.

But, before deciding that Twitter could be the best (or worst) thing for customer interaction since the telephone, or a big time waster for your organization, one must understand realistic ways to approach Twitter and how to gain the most value from this new mode of communication. As with any new social platform or communication channel, organizations need to understand how and why they might be able to take advantage of it and what it means to be involved.

What is Twitter?

First a definition – Twitter is a platform for communication that lets registered users send short, 140-character updates (otherwise known as “tweets”). A tweet is a like a combination of instant messaging and email, but open and viewable by anyone across the internet. These public tweets are aggregated and displayed in what is known as the Twitter stream. Individual users can also privately tweet messages to other users who are their followers.

Naturally, Twitter can easily become overwhelming, depending on the amount of people one follows and the difficulty that comes with navigating between value and noise. Thus, as with any other social media application, a level of commitment in terms of both time and resources is necessary to build trust between those who post and the audiences they are trying to reach.

Why does Twitter matter?

Twitter Share of Online Applications

For some perspective on the importance of Twitter, consider that if it sustained its 1000+% growth rate from 2008 to 2009, Twitter would be on track to represent some 20% of all online conversation by 2013. However, for comparison’s sake one must also note that other social platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn have also experienced incredible growth across all demographics and user types.

Twitter’s growth is important, but will likely face difficulties in maintaining its current user enrollment trajectories. Irrespective of its actual growth, many of your customers and employees are likely already participating in a dialogue about your brand or service using Twitter. Your organization should be aware of this dialogue be and developing a proactive plan for interaction.

Where is the value to my Organization?

The real question for most organizations is how to most effectively leverage Twitter. Properly utilized, Twitter can help bring a human element to an organization. When used well, Twitter can help your organization answer questions, identify and solve customer issues, as well as promote and sell things to potential customers.

Below are four strategies for how organizations can leverage Twitter:

Communications: If you only do one thing with Twitter, set up a corporate account owned by your communications function- this serves to stake your brand claim before someone else does. Use a corporate Twitter account to point out interesting events or developments within your market space and share your reactions with them. Also, consider adding links to success stories and media mentions instead of simply posting a link to a press release. Before you start posting (or “tweeting”), sit back and listen; follow individuals with some connection to your organization, offerings and marketplace in order to identify both known and unknown influencers.
Marketing: Providing valuable and interesting content is the best way to attract incremental new followers and earn the trust of the ones you already have. Twitter cultivates a dialogue with customers, prospects and other interested followers, over time making them more receptive to comments made about an industry or market dynamics. It also makes followers more receptive to promotional tweets regarding events and downloadable content (e.g. white papers, special offers or invitations). Additionally, in B-to-C many examples are emerging of Twitter driving millions of dollars of transactional business at companies like Dell and Zappos. Subject matter experts (SMEs) within an organization should be encouraged to tweet on a regular basis to support ongoing marketing programs and to position both individual SMEs and the organization as a whole as market experts.
Sales: Because Twitter news travels fast, Sales should also proactively use it to monitor developments in their markets. Reps can follow influencers and organizations that regularly talk about key business issues to raise knowledge and better prepare for prospect and customer interactions. Given that reps may have limited time to monitor Twitter, they should subscribe to searches that notify them whenever relevant tweets are posted. Often, a rep may be the only company employee a customer knows personally; if the customer is trying to ask a question via Twitter they may go directly to the rep.
Service: Due to the increasing amount of consumer participation in Twitter, more and more of your customers could be announcing their issues when they can’t reach customer service or support centers through other means. These types of technical support or services issues should be responded to promptly, before a customer broadcasts a negative experience more widely. This type of consumer engagement requires coordination and integration into the rest of the service and support processes.

Consideration before taking the plunge

Before executing any of these Twitter initiatives, organizations big or small must put in place policies and procedures to effectively leverage the channel. Below are some key areas for consideration:

Determine who your dedicated users are from a line of business or product group perspective, as well as who has overall corporate responsibility.
Set up monitoring processes that will allow for more granularity in the tracking of not only company and product mentions, but also competitors and influencers in a targeted way.
Set policies and procedures that clearly state what is allowed for public comment on behalf of your organization and use monitoring technologies to ensure compliance.
Determine resourcing, whether it be centralized or de-centralized, and put in place cross-functional process and feedback mechanisms among main Twitter participants.

Measures of success

Measuring success in any marketing or communications channel is important to validate the investment and return. Social media and platforms like Twitter demand and require more human capital than monetary investment in order to see measurable ROI. Some of the keys to successful measurement are as follows:

Set Goals up Front – An obvious one, but sometimes overlooked as organizations leap before they look. Ensure measurement is connected to a specific outcome, whether it be customer service resolutions, product promotion or connecting a face to your brand.
Track Click Through – Measure click-through from Twitter to your website, downloadable content or e-commerce engine
Use Keyword Strategies – Optimize how followers or consumers interested in your brand or products find you. Own the name space related to your company and your products.
Track Re-Tweets – Re-tweets are re-posts of content that you have published that people in Twitter share with their followers – this is the viral effect.
Followers versus Followees – Measure followers that are interested in the content and messages you are sharing as well as gaining potential access to their follower networks
Measure User Replies – Measure the one to one dialogue that users are having with your organization. Is volume growing? Are the conversations more positive or negative? How does this compare against your competitors?

In a sea of Web 2.0 technologies, Twitter — the microblogging service that restricts each entry, or tweet, to 140 characters — has managed to transcend basic instant messaging and social networking. It is a new and completely original form of communication that has gained worldwide adoption and captured the imaginations of people at every level of media interest or influence.
TIME Magazine