Twitter for Dummies - Laura Fitton [87]
At its best, the community concept of sharing and connecting can help you spread a positive image and good comments about your company; done wrong, it can veer into feel-good, self-help banter that’s ultimately empty. Again, don’t fuss too much about Twitter as a tool. Think more strategically about the community and what they care about and engage them with substance and real contributions.
Building a community is not necessarily the same as building a network:
Network: Your network is there for you and your business, a kind of foundation for concrete professional growth.
Community: Building a community means inspiring the people who follow you on Twitter to embrace your brand and create a feeling of solidarity around your business, service, staff, or product.
With a community, you can build a loyal corps of evangelists: people who are passionate about your brand, even though they have no professional or financial stake in the company. If you can engender the community feeling through your use of Twitter and how you interact with your customers, your customers begin to feel emotionally invested in your success online.
You can see this community feeling with Zappos. The Twitter users who follow the shoe retailer are so dedicated that they act like they’re legitimately invested in the brand’s success. Zappos fosters this effect by staying on top of what people on Twitter are saying about them, or about shoes in general, through the use of monitoring tools. Then they jump in with help, as needed. If you tweet about having trouble finding any kind of shoe, for example, you can expect a Zappos employee to send you a direct message (DM) or @reply in less than a day that includes links to the proper pages on the Zappos site. Plus, Zappos has spent so much time building a strong community that Twitter members who don’t even work for Zappos will routinely pass along information they see or hear and will even reach out on behalf of the company and connect potential customers with Zappos.com.
You can also see the community around less popular products, such as Comcast’s cable offerings. Even while people express frustration about their cable service, members of their Twitter network still point them to @Comcastcares to find help.
Community is also a huge aspect of many musicians’ and artists’ Twitter experiences, such as Imogen Heap (@ImogenHeap) and John Mayer (@johncmayer). Heap uses Twitter to interact more directly with her fan base, which increases the loyalty of her listeners, who have come to see a more human side of her and feel like they’ve even come to know her. If someone tweets something about Heap that her Twitter followers don’t like, you can watch the community leap to her defense. At the same time, tweets from her Twitter community usually reflect the tone of her own calm tweets, remaining mellow and not shrill.
Musicians, actors and other celebrities are really personality-based businesses, and bringing forth those personalities on Twitter by asking questions and sharing parts of their lives cements a valuable engagement between the artist and fans.
You can build community through
Genuine interaction
Asking questions
Honesty
Transparency
Following people back who follow you
Not over-automating
Being more than a link list
Providing value
Conducting Research
Twitter is an excellent tool for crowd-sourcing and focus-group research. You can easily get the answers you seek after you establish a relationship with your followers that encourages participation, conversation, and sharing. The real challenge is finding reliable methods to extract and analyze the data: Twitter is still a very new medium, and analytics tools associated with it aren’t yet that advanced. Larger corporations are diving in to conduct their own research and build their own tools that can make sense of the tremendous amount of data being generated on Twitter all the time.
If you’re willing to experiment with different ways to watch the Twitter stream, you can collect passive data (what people