7 Questions Some Brands Are Asking About Twitter [My answers]
Jeremiah Owyang posted an entry about more advanced brands that are asking the right questions about Twitter. It seemed too long for a comment on his blog, so I decided to answer it here as I believe the questions are interesting and valid. For more questions follow me on @antoniocapo
I have direct insight on this as I started and managed a Twitter account for a Top 4 consulting company. Now that brand is one of the Top 100 talked about brands on Twitter according to BrandRepublic.
Jeremiah’s questions:
Context:
This by no means represents all brands, but just some brands, perhaps those that are a bit more sophisticated.
Last Friday I had a conversation with a manufacturing firm that had some relatively sophisticated questions about how they will prepare their plan around Twitter. This was a nice break from the “why does Twitter matter†questions I usually get, as they were thinking through a plan.
Here’s some of the excellent questions this organization, and a handful of others brands are starting to ask:
1. Should we create multiple accounts for different divisions? How should we name them? Â How should the content be different?
- The approach you take depends on the type of company and service it provides. Depends on the type of clients that are served and depends on the purpose of the account.
- For simplification sake a company can start by defining the role that the corporate account would play. Is a simple non-interactive push of information or is it an effort to give the company a more human face? Which ties into the next question.
- The creation of accounts comes with responsibility. Don’t create them if you don’t have the resources to staff them. Twitter takes a lot of time if you are just getting started and figuring everything all out.
- Protect your accounts. Create accounts that tie directly to your brand and park them with a pointer to your main account if you don’t have the resources to staff it.
2. Is it OK to just tweet out news on our main corporate account? Or should we be conversational?
The question is fair but it addresses the core of Twitter as a service. Twitter is conversational by nature. Because of that nature, a corporate account that only tweets news would not have as much success as an account that has a conversational aspect to it. I’ve experienced both and the conversational approach outperforms the publishing of news by a large margin.
If you are worried that your Twitter corporate account would start getting polluted with too many replies, then that’s the time to think about a second official account through which you can respond to your replies without having to “pollute” the main Twitter stream of worthy news.
3. How do we get our corporate reps (sales, product teams) to use this tool, and be conversational?
It really depends on the purpose that you’ve set up to accomplish with Twitter.
- Customer support — Get them individual accounts and set up an on going session to get them familiar with Twitter
- Thought leadership — Crowdsource internally via Yammer or other corporate microblogging tools.
- Sales support — Look at Zappos for a great example.
4. Should we follow folks? If so, what’s the protocol? Should we only follow folks that follow us? We don’t want to appear like ‘big brother’
- Follow people and brands you care about either as a partnership or competitive
- Remember that Twitter s a one-way friendship system. Don’t feel you need to follow back immediately. Don’t feel people only need to follow you.
- Follow backs need to be vetted
5. What are the tools to use to manage multiple authors/tweeters?
6. How can we find other examples of B2B twitter examples?
7. How should we brand our Twitter backgrounds images?
- Follow corporate brand practices so that you will be on brand but be flexible as the Twitter background is neither a landing page nor a photo.
- Use the left hand side to be more creative
- If needed place a disclaimer that would save you and your brand legal troubles.
What questions are you hearing from brands that are approacing Twitter?  I gauge the level of sophitication of a brand by which of these five questions they’re trying to answer, just change out ’social media’ to ‘twitter’ to gauge.
Are you at an agency or at a brand? What questions are you hearing about Twitter?
UPDATE: SocialSquared’s Jess Sloss and Sampad’s Indian Perspective cover Jeremiah’s 7 questions as well. Check them out!
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