Many companies want to start using Twitter to promote their brand and business, but don’t really know where to start. As most companies are starting to realize, Twitter is a great way to reinforce your brand, share news and important information, gather feedback , advertise and most importantly, start a dialogue with your customers and prospects – and the only cost is the time of the people involved with managing the Twitter feed.Here is a short list of best practices for corporate Twittering that I compiled for one of my clients. Most small-to-medium businesses should be able to achieve results with a couple of hours of effort per week.
Getting Started
- Pick a Twitter name that matches your company name or alternatively a name that includes your company name such as @companyteam
- Build up a level of tweets so other users will see you as credible and relevant – the minimum number of tweets that you should accumulate before you start promoting your account is somewhere in the 50 to 100 range (most users will ignore you if you have few tweets or haven’t been tweeting for very long)
- Fill out your profile completely including a URL as most people will not follow anyone with an incomplete profile
- Create a customized Twitter homepage (that matches your corporate brand as much as possible) to provide additional information about your company and products
Getting your message out
- Try to tweet 5 to 8 times per day, and you should space them out throughout the day if possible
- Only 20% or so of your tweets should be related to your company or include a marketing or ‘advertising’ message – the others should be tweets about related topics that provide value to your followers or show a more human side of your company; people will stop paying attention to you if you use Twitter exclusively for self-promotion
- Most of your tweets should contain a link to a website, blog post, article, etc. – these are the types of tweets will establish your Twitter account as being a source of great content and worthy of being followed back
- Use HootSuite’s to schedule your tweets and to track your tweet clickthrus and their Hootlet app to easily tweet the URLs of content at the source – Hootsuite also lets you include multiple users on the same account which can help to spread out the Twitter workload
Following people
- Use one or more of the Twitter directories (WeFollow or Twellow) to locate potential users to follow based on their interests and geography
- Follow anyone who mentions your company or keywords that important for your business
- Periodically do a Twitter search on your company name or click on @yourname from right panel to see who is re-tweeting you or mentioning your name
- @reply people to thank people or to just reach out to them
- RT or re-tweet posts that you think are worthy – generally these people will notice and start following you
- You don’t want to grow your Twitter following too quickly – steady growth is better and a goal of growing 100 to 200 per month is a good start for most businesses
And finally as noted in The Guide to Corporate Twittering, you should:
- Be honest
- Be responsive and human
- Be nice
Comments
 Hi Tom, Great post. How are things in Socal? Thanks, Tim Knight |
 I will be forwarding this to clients. Great info! |
Great post. Many organizations think of Twitter as just another publishing stream for their own content then seek the largest number of followers they can find. This inevitably fails because people don't want to know just about a product or service, they want to learn about the overall subject or topic and how it relates to them. As a fellow Tweeter once said, if you are marketing dog food, don't talk about dog food, talk about dogs. Once one finds the right content mix it is important to realize that this isn't purely a numbers game. I like your advice to build your list slowly. If you spend the time to carefully target your specific audience, and make sure to participate in conversation by replying and reTweeting, then you can build a loyal following that is actually paying attention to your messages. Those who just Tweet without listening end up getting ignored themselves. Also in terms of listening via Twitter searches, I find it is also handy to subscribe to the RSS feed for the search. This way one can set up searches on the company name, associated brands, products, etc. and easily follow them in an RSS reader such as Google Reader. This helps to ensure that you are listening consistently. Happy Tweeting! - @hacool |
thank you- this helpful guide is appreciated |
 Great tips! I have one to add. Besides checking your @YourCompanyName mentions, you need to search on your company name without the @. Many Twitter users either don't bother to use the @ or don't know that you have a Twitter account. This goes for product names as well. Another thing I just recently realized: you need to search on alternate spellings of your company and/or product name. In our case, we have a product called TextExpander, all one word. But if I search on "text expander", I find many additional mentions. Try to think like a customer/user--always a good idea. :-) |
Great post - I'm saving it and sending it off to clients who ask this question, "Should I Twitter?" |
 Thanks loads for the review of the Glasshouse Partnership Corporate Twittering Guide, Tom. I'm really glad people are liking it, but feel slightly guilty. Do bear in mind that it was written when Twitter was a non-corporate tool. Things have evolved, and in particular the array of analytical and monitoring tools and the ability to integrate Twitter with other social platforms are way more evolved than they were. We're working on an update of the guide as we speak. Watch this space. Meantime, we're falling in love with tools like ubervu |
 Two comments to nit-pick out of your great advice: First, while HootSuite is a good tool for tracking mentions, it's built-in URL shortener, ow.ly, is not good. If you run some web searches on ow.ly and SEO, you'll see why. Namely, if you visit a http://ow.ly link and click a link within that page and then another link and so forth, the browser URL remains the original URL you visited. Hence, ow.ly steals analytical traffic. Second, I fail to understand the rationale for companies to "follow" anyone who mentions their company. I might mention a company ONCE and never again, yet am followed. That's silly. |
 Great article, Tom. Thanks for the advice! |
Tom, Great tips for Businesses, they do need to know how to balance marketing, socializing and responding to comments… What I love about ubervu is their reactions evolution legend letting you know how many people made comments in a places like twitter, dig, redit delicious,YT, WP, etc. on the keywords you are searching, I expect they will add more platforms. DrDeb Nd Boston |
Terrific information. Thanks! |
 Tom, you didn't include your @name! |
mizmedia just pointed out that I didn't include my @twittername. The reason is that I originally wrote this post for my Social Media Musings blog at http://tomhumbarger.wordpress.com and then it got picked up by Social Media Today. You can find me on Twitter at @tomhumbarger (http://twitter.com/tomhumbarger). Thanks again for all of your comments! Tom Humbarger |
 mizmedia just noted that I didn't include my @twittername in this blog post. The reason I didn't add the @twittername is that the post originally appeared on my Social Media Musings blog (http://tomhumbarger.wordpress.com) and then it was picked up Social Media Today. For anyone who wants to follow me on Twitter, you can find me at @tomhumbarger. Thanks again for all of your comments. Tom Humbarger |
bow wow! ... its awesome.. dude.. good job.. keep it up! |
Tom, How did you come up with the 20% rule? I agree that not all tweets should be directly about your product or company, but I also think it largely depends on your twitter audience. In some instances, I wouldn't recommend talking marketing at all. You can talk about the company in a non-marketing way. And sometimes that is very necessary. Sarah Jo (@pedalprincess) |
I think that until some of these corporate guys start to realize that twitter/facebook etc. can be valueable assets to the organization...most corporate folks think that if folks are twittering or on facebook they are goofing off. I think we're a long way from corporations embracing the power of twitter, etc. |
Great article -- I just recently launched my company's Twitter stream, and it's been a great learning experience. I do, however, have a question re "limiting tweets about your company to 20%". My assumption is if someone is following us on Twitter, it's the company news they are after. I noticed that when I re-tweet something industry related, it gets very few click-throughs. The most popular items were photos of our installations and events. So in a way I treat our twitter stream as a RSS feed to the audience. We are a B2B company, with a channel sales model, so my objective (overall) is to disseminate news about the company to the people who hopefully care. Is that not the right approach? Any feedback on the corporate twitter is welcome: http://twitter.com/firetide! |
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