rationality and randomness http://awmitchell.posterous.com a personal blog of eclectic interests posterous.com Mon, 31 Aug 2009 03:17:00 -0700 Best Practices for Corporate Twittering - or not? http://awmitchell.posterous.com/best-practices-for-corporate-twittering-0 http://awmitchell.posterous.com/best-practices-for-corporate-twittering-0

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.

I'm in two minds about this item. On one had there is some good advice such as building up your level of tweets before you try to engage. But then there's a couple of real clangers:

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.

and

Follow anyone who mentions your company or keywords that important for your business.

Too me, these just illustrate what makes me uneasy about this article. It's not about real engagement person to person, despite the final advice:

 

  • Be honest
  • Be responsive and human
  • Be nice
  • The implied message in this article is "here's how to use Twitter for marketing while hiding the fact that you're tryng to market to people". Not the sort of people that I want on my list of Twitter friends.

     

    Sourced via @kimmar on Twitter.

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    http://posterous.com/images/profile/missing-user-75.png http://posterous.com/users/4aQUIzR5baEN Andrew Mitchell awmitchell Andrew Mitchell