Twitter for Dummies - Laura Fitton [86]
Sharing Company Updates
If you have a new or growing company that you want to introduce to the world through Twitter, start a separate account for the company, just as Laura did with @oneforty. You may find balancing traditional corporate professionalism with the level of transparency that Twitter users have come to expect to be a little tricky sometimes, so keep these guidelines in mind when you start your new account:
Provide value to the Twitter community. Your company account can become a source of news, solutions, ideas, entertainment, or information that’s more than just a series of links to products and services. Educate your Twitter followers. Reach out to people whom you can genuinely and unselfishly help. You can even offer sales incentives for products, in the way that @DellOutlet does, as long as what you offer has genuine value. Establish your company’s leadership in providing ideas, solutions, and innovation.
Attach a real-world face to the account. If you need to use a company logo as the avatar because of internal regulations or because multiple people are maintaining the account, make sure to list the names of the actual people who are tweeting in the Bio section of your business’s Twitter profile, and consider signing each tweet with the author’s initials. This approach lets your followers become familiar with who’s behind the company voice and it makes them feel more engaged. People like to talk to other people, not brands.
Don’t spam. Don’t flood the Twitter feed with self-promotional links or product information that don’t deliver genuine value to readers. Whether self-promotional or not, you never want to clog up peoples’ Twitter streams with irrelevant information. You might not talk about your cat or your marriage on a company account, but you can still make it personal. Profile an employee, talk about milestones for employees, or talk about what’s going on in your office. You can even hold tweetups at your office and invite your followers to stop by, like Boston’s NPR news station WBUR (@WBUR) does. This approach gives people a peek at what makes your company run.
Before tweeting in earnest for your company, it’s a good idea to openly discuss your plans to demonstrate that you’re taking a productive, innovative approach and to prevent any misguided fears that twittering means you will somehow suddenly start to leak sensitive company information or otherwise break reasonable corporate policies. As with any public communications platform, you do need to consider just how much you can say about what goes on inside your business. Transparency is key, but you don’t want to disclose industry secrets in a public forum. Every company has a different style. It helps to have a good plan in place and make sure that the employees assigned to the company Twitter account are trustworthy and have solid judgment.
Building Community
Community-building sometimes suffers from a kum-ba-ya perception that devalues the importance of using tools such as Twitter to connect with people. But building a truly engaged community is extremely valuable.
Apple is an example of a company that benefits tremendously from its engaged community in terms of promotion, sales, and even customer support administered from one Apple fan directly to others. Apple built its community by building great products people get passionate about, not by worrying about any particular tools. So as you approach the Twitter opportunity, remember how powerful and engaged community can be and remember what people actually engage around — the things they really and truly care about.