Much has been written about how social media and online communities can be leveraged to help achieve your business goals. But how exactly do you do that? This piece takes off from where our previous cover story (How Social networks help improve your business) was left.
This month, we will take up the current hot social network – Twitter and see how your business can build a useful presence on Twitter and how it can leverage that presence.
For this article, we assume that you have no previous experience with Twitter, but are otherwise web-savvy.
Twitter basics
Before we start getting into the serious stuff, what is Twitter? Twitter is what they call a micro-blogging site. Blogging means users put up their own content as in an online dairy; micro in the sense that you are limited to 140 characters per entry. And What can you do with these 140 characters? With a little bit of ingenuity, quite a bit, as people have found out. The most celebrated example of what a business can do in Twitter is that of delloutlet, a Dell account who has sold over three million dollars worth of refurbished computer equipment from Dell over Twitter. That is on one side of the spectrum. On the other side, there are many small businesses which have used Twitter to reach out to more customers, sell more products, provide help and service and so on.
Coming back, you start using Twitter by registering at Twitter.com, by clicking on the green 'Sign up now' button on the home page and filling in the details in the sign up page.
An update you post in Twitter is referred to as tweet, and all updates are public unless you post a direct message to someone, which is viewable only by the person it is meant for . This is important in business, as we will see later. You post a direct (private) message by starting your message with a “D”, followed by the screen name of the use it is meant for. In a tweet, you put an @ before the username to indicate that it is a user name. But to send a direct message to us at DARE, you start “D daretostartup” without the @ and type in the rest of your message (because daretostartup is our screen name on Twitter. There is one more thing to be done before you send a direct message. You can send a direct message only to some one following you and vice-versa. So, before sending direct messages, you need to ensure that you follow each other.
| 12 Twitter rules for businesses
1 The best way to use twitter is never to go to twitter.com. Use one of the many clients instead. 2 While you have 140 characters to play with, you should leave as much free space as possible so that others can retweet your message easily. 3 Choose a username that makes it easy to identify your brand. 4 Your followers are your wealth on Twitter. They are the ones that hear what you tweet. Their followers will hear it, if they retweet your message. Talk to them. Respond to their queries and comments. 5 Social media has no concept of office hours and is at work round the clock. So, your social media evangelists should be able to connect from home on while on the road. 6 Do not Tweetflood (too many updates posted together). Do not be erratic. Remember that slow and steady wins the race. 7 Use tools to enhance your twittering – URL shorteners like bit.ly, picture embedding like twitpic, twitterfeed to tweet automatically when you update your website, CoTweet to schedule tweets and so on. 8 Following all those who follow you is NOT a good way to increase number of followers for a serious business. People will follow you for the value you are offering. Signing on to autofollow sites is an absolute no-no. Most such followers do not even know that they are following you. 9 Listen to what others are saying about you, your competition, your industry, your environment. Use tools like Yahoo Sideline for this. 10 Tweet messages that are useful, that provide them information or otherwise make life easier. Offer to help only if you really can and that too immediately. 11 Take all complaints (and personal information) as private direct messages. After an immediate acknowledgement. Follow the person immediately and request details in a DM. Take the case off twitter itself into your regular channels as soon as possible. 12 DO NOT argue or fight. This is one thing I never tire of repeating. Never ever argue or fight with a (potential) customer. You are the big bully. The other guy is the David against you, the Goliath. He will always win in the minds of the others, even if you are absolutely right and he is a crazy idiot. |
By following some one, you can not only DM (direct message) that person, but you get to see that person’s public timeline. That is, all the tweets other than DMS that that user makes will now appear on your Twitter page. Following another user is fairly easy and is as simple as clicking the follow button against their name in the find people page or under their photographs in their home page (or public timeline) which will be at http://twitter.com/. Once you have followed someone, clicking on unfollow will stop the follow.
Your followers are your actual wealth on Twitter. Your followers are the ones who hear what you tweet. Their followers will hear it, if they retweet your message. So, one of your primary objectives on Twitter is to gather as large a number of followers as possible. We will discuss how to do this in a while.
| Twitter client Comments | |
| CoTweet
DestroyTwitter Digsby Seesmic Desktop TweetDeck Twhirl Twim Twitterberry Twitterfon Twitterfox Twitteriffic Twittergadget |
Web based, handles multiple users for same account and threads conversations
Desktop client for Mac, Windows, Linux Windows, Mac, Linux. Does email and IM also Desktop, iPhone, web. Can handle multiple accounts, shows sent messages to non – followers Windows, Mac, Linux, iPhone. Can handle multiple accounts Windows, Mac. Any java cellphone. Single account For Blackberry For iPhone. Pro version ($4.99) does multiple accounts Firefox extension that stays in a corner of the browser Mac, iPhone Integrates into Gmail |
Like you forward an email to others in your list, you can forward someone else’s tweet to your followers by putting RT (retweet) followed by the username before the original message. For example “RT @daretostartup: Managed IT Services for SMEs: An Opportunity” means you are forwarding daretostartup’s original tweet – Managed IT Services for SMEs. The colon after the username is a good practice and is not mandatory.
Actually, you will not do all of this from your page at twitter.com. You will use one or more of the many Twitter clients available to manage all of this easily.
Before you start
Before you get started on Twitter, you need to have your web infrastructure in place. At the least, you need a web page that you can direct your followers to. At the web page, you should ideally have a mechanism to take orders (or at least feedback). If you have a mechanism to take orders, then you should also have a way in which they can enter coupon codes to claim discounts. Obviously, you should have a mechanism for fulfilling those orders and for responding to the feedback, complaints, etc.
One account or many?
Now that you have decided to make your business present on Twitter comes the question – how many accounts do you need? One or many? Broadly, each brand should have its separate Twitter accounts. Beyond that, the answer depends on many factors, like how many functions are you going to carry over to the service. Brand promotion may require an ID that is different from say product support. But it is ok to start out with one catchall account for a brand and then activate more as you go along and the load increases. To go back to our Dell example, they have 34 Twitter accounts active at the time of this writing! It is advisable that you register and keep user names you would want to use in the future to avoid someone else taking them over.
What name?
“What’s in a name?” wrote the Bard of Avon in that eternal love story, Romeo and Juliet, “That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet“. But if you are DELL, you would not want to be known as IBM or HP. Right? So, getting your Twitter user name to be the same or similar to your real life brand name is important.
If you are creating the Twitter account for your business, then your user name should not be the the personal name of someone operating the account. You can identify the person operating the account if you want to, by including it in the bio section or in the web page that you link to from Twitter. For instance, our earlier example of delloutlet has a bio that reads “Refurbished Dell™ computers, electronics. Question/comment? Contact Stefanie Nelson at @StefanieAtDell. More Dell Twitter accounts at www.Dell.com/Twitter”
CNN has a user name cnnbrk (CNN breaking news), which initially was registered by someone else and was subsequently bought by CNN. Kingfisher Airlines uses flykingfisher, which is synonymous with their website address flykingfisher.com. TCS is followtcs, while Hindustan Times Newspaper is HTTweets and DARE is daretostartup.
Once you register your account, go to the settings page and setup your account details. Here, upload your logo so that other users can easily recognize you and give the URL to your home page or a feedback page and include one line bio or introduction that identifies who you are. You can also change your home page background to show your brand colors etc. from here.
How many people?
This is one question that is often not even asked when a brand sets out on a social media adventure. Any social media effort – and Twitter is just one of many in which you may have a presence- requires time and effort. Depending on the amount of effort, you need to allocate resources to it. If you are not sure, and are just starting off, then the minimum number of people required is two, with the second being a backup for when the first person is overloaded or otherwise not available. At DARE, our social media effort is small and we have three people working on it. @Bineshkutty is the primary resource and @kkumarkg (me) is the backup. The two of us have other tasks and both of us maintain personal accounts too on Twitter, which we often use to promote @daretostartup’s tweets. And Vijay Rana our designer chips in to create new tweets, monitor what is happening, etc. Remember that social media has no concept of office hours and is at work round the clock. So, you may need your social media evangelists to be able to connect up from home on while on the road.
Twitter clients
Like I said before, you would rarely if ever use the twitter.com web page to post updates or to reply to tweets. There are a variety of clients for every communication device imaginable that helps you post and respond on Twitter. There is probably no single client that fits everyone’s needs. Also, depending on where you are – at your desk, on the road, at home and so on, you may need to use different clients at different times. And as you become more and more experienced on Twitter, you will graduate from a simple client like TweetDeck or Twitterfox to Seesmic Desktop or CoTweet.
We will take a brief look at some of the clients that are more suited for business use.
Twitterfox
Twitterfox is a lightweight extension that is installed on Firefox. It can handle multiple accounts, but can login to only one at a time. Twitterfox has three tabs – Recent, Mentions and Messages, with a text box below where you input your tweets.
Recent shows your public timeline, Mentions shows tweets that have @ inside them and the Messages tab shows direct messages to you. Hovering over a tweet gives you icons to reply to that tweet or to mark it as a favorite. Hovering over the tweeters picture gives details from the profile including number of followers, following, location, URL and number of updates.
Best use of Twitterfox is for personal accounts and as a stop gap arrangement for business tweeting.
Tweetdeck
TweetDeck is an Adobe Air application. It handles multiple accounts and is easy to understand and use. You can define what you want to see in each of the columns and how many columns you want displayed. If multiple people are operating the same account, then there can be confusion since it does not show tweets sent to non-followers (this is true with most clients other than Seesmic Desktop and CoTweet).
Tweetdeck has some interesting features, the one I like the most being “tweetshrink this update”. After you have brought down your text to 140 characters, if you click on this button, it will attempt to reduce character count further by replacing some words with accepted short forms. For example, today becomes 2day, you becomes U and so on. Why is this important? While you have 140 characters to play with, you should leave as much free space as possible so that others can retweet your message easily.
There is one big mess up likely with Tweetdeck, if you are using multiple accounts. Tweetdeck can keep all accounts active in the tweet tab. So, if you are say tweeting from your personal account and by chance the brand account is also active, the tweet will be posted from both accounts simultaneously. And this can be messy. Check which all account names are highlighted every time you tweet to avoid this.
Seesmic Desktop
Seesmic Desktop, another Adobe Air application is not for everybody and takes getting used to. The one big advantage Seesmic has over Tweetdeck is that it can show you tweets sent from all your accounts. So, if there are multiple people handling the brand’s Twitter account, You can keep track of what Tweets each other is sending in order to avoid confusion and double talk.
Another god feature of Seesmic is that your searches in Twitter messages get automatically saved. While TweetDeck also has a similar feature, Seesmic is more sophisticated in this respect, saving your search as a detachable column that can be viewed separately and is automatically updated. Both in TweetDeck and Seesmic, the search function is fairly simplistic, really simple text search. Later on in this article, we will see how to do better searches in Twitter.
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