All work and no play
Wales Business — By Katie Chappelle on October 12, 2009 6:00 am
Twitter has gained ground as a serious tool for business
SOME 54% of Fortune Magazine’s 100 largest companies in the US now use the micro-blogging site Twitter to engage with customers and stakeholders, a recent study from Burston-Marsteller PR and Proof Digital has found.
In contrast, the same piece of research found that only 32% use blogs and 29% use Facebook fan pages. As such, it would seem that Twitter now has the edge as a way for businesses to communicate online.
Twitter gained around seven million new visitors in June 2009 alone, according to market research ComScore – which begs the question: why the sudden explosion in micro-blogging?
Unlike Facebook, Bebo and MySpace, Twitter is not purely social networking. Although the site can be used for chatting to friends and sharing photos, it is more often used as a promotional tool for businesses, experts and bloggers. This could be why 84% of Twitter users are over 24-years old, making the platform far better placed to connect with other interested businesses, journalists and influential people.
It can be all too easy to dismiss social media as a fad. But perhaps it’s time for business leaders to sit up and take notice. Keeping on top of the internet is all about identifying the next big trend and there is no doubt that social networking is currently riding the crest of a wave.
In case you are still yet to ‘tweet’, Twitter is a micro-blogging site based on the question ‘what are you doing?’ You have 140 characters per tweet (it is a bit like a Facebook status update) and you can follow people to see what they are saying. In turn, your followers and any interested parties may follow you back to keep updated on your activities.
The first step of planning a Twitter campaign should be identifying who you want to interact with. It is always worth following businesses offering a similar service to yourself – what better way to keep an eye on the competition? – as well as stakeholders and journalists. They are likely to follow you back (provided you have added a picture and filled in your bio details, otherwise it will be hard to trust who you are) and you are on your way to creating a community. Users such as Innocent Drinks do the ‘community’ aspect well; its website, Twitter account, blog, YouTube channel and newsletter are all interlinked and give subscribers the feeling that they are part of a group – Innocent even calls anyone who signs up to its newsletter as a ‘family member’.
Twitter is perfect for promoting an achievement or a new product or service. It is a micro-blog, so there is no need to spend time writing a detailed post or article. With only 140 characters allowed per tweet, it is a speedy way of linking back to your website, a press release or a podcast, to raise awareness of what you are doing. Make sure you explain what you are linking to and a note asking your followers to “please RT” (retweet). Basically what this means is that if other Twitterers like your post or find it useful, they will pass it on in a retweet, possibly resulting in more hits to your website.
However, it is not enough to simply transmit information, you need to take part in the Twitter conversation. If twitterers that you follow post a question, feel free to answer. If someone writes something that you find interesting or informative, let them know. The thought of allowing other users to be able to comment freely worries some people, but if something negative is said, you will often find that others will come to your defence.
In the US, companies are already recognising that Twitter is a valuable way to contact customers and stakeholders; Comcast (an American cable, internet and phone provider) is making customer service the top priority on Twitter. The senior director of its customer service department regularly monitors the site, searching to see what users are saying about their service and contacting them accordingly to rectify problems.
Thanks to the social networking explosion, the balance of power has shifted. The lines between ‘big businesses’ and ‘little people’ have been blurred, as everyone is equal online. There has also been an increase in ‘citizen journalism’; members of the public using their mobile phones to take pictures or videos and uploading the footage to websites or blogs within minutes. This means businesses are not able to control the news; instead they need to be fast to manage a crisis. Crisis management can be dealt with quickly and easily on Twitter. “No comment” is no longer an option. If you do not say anything, someone else using social media will.
It is important to think about the level of visibility you want to have on Twitter. If you only want to communicate with a select few, mark your profile as private. That way, only those approved by you will see your updates. It is also very important to remember that digital dirt sticks! Be selective over who has access to update your Twitter page. Damaging messages do not always go away after they have been deleted, once the message is out there, it is accessible to all.
Remember that all of this hard work can take a while to bed in. You will need to get used to the format of Twitter and build up your followers, so don’t worry if you don’t see results straight away.
If you still need proof about why your businesses should be tweeting, a quick google search for ‘Twitter success stories’ will throw up hundreds of examples of companies (big and small) who have hugely benefited from joining. Dell Computer Outlet, for example, reportedly will made $1million worth of sales through its Twitter feed alone by December 2009. When the company then announced that it would be offering deals through Twitter, its follower number increased from 8,000 to around 500,000 users.
If nothing else, Twitter is a free way of reaching millions of potential customers. However, during a time when businesses are looking at getting the most from what they spend, perhaps it is also something that businesses can not afford to ignore.
- To read Katie’s top 10 tips for businesses using Twitter, log on to www.wepr.co.uk/blog
Tags: public debate, social media
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3 Comments
I think Katie’s dead-right to say that a business needs to commit appropriate time / resources to achieve some benefit from twitter, rather than just fiddle around the edges. But that presents a real challenge for business to overcome the communication fatigue of new technologies.
For some, Facebook and social media is not an established way-of-life, it’s still a new technology. And the challenge for businesses will be how they choose which horses to back in this race.
It took Telex technology (for our younger readers, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegraphy#Telex) several decades to become established, then mainstream and then legacy. Fax technology achieved the same in about 15 years. Just take a look at http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/twitter.com to see where twitter was in 2007.
Surely the next technology is just around the corner.
It is important to see Twitter as another tool in a communication mix, and like any tool if you only use one you probably won’t succeed. So an online strategy needs to be mixed with other media as well. So if you do Twitter and Blog, then make sure at the very least that your blogs get tweeted automatically. (There’s a sentence you wouldn’t have read a few years ago!)
But the true value for Twitter is, IMHO, helping to develop the sense of the person on the web. Social media and social networking removes the human interaction from exchanges. There’s no body language, no eye contact, none of the “human, touchy feely stuff”. Tools like Twitter can plug that gap to some degree by helping to develop the character behind the name.
Again, IMHO, there is nothing worse than being sold to on Twitter, with no engagement. Similarly, it is not a great idea to get twittering just when you want to broadcast something, as some political candidates are now doing. That’s just creating a new broadcast medium that will turn people away, because if you had nothing worth saying before it’s unlikely that you’ve anything worth hearing now.
Finally: with a name like Twitter can I suggest that we don’t take it too seriously. It can be a place for some fun, it can be a little less formal, less politically correct and somewhere to enjoy snappy one-liner exchanges.
I tend to agree with Alan Davies on this.
In our experience, businesses are still struggling with websites and email let alone blogging and social media. This is mainly because older business owners (who have their secretaries print out emails) do not engage online and certainly do not trust younger, more internet aware, staff to represent the business or their brand online in such dangerous territories as twitter or facebook.
This is a generational thing and so although things are changing fast there will still be a few years before online activity becomes a fully integrated part of business.
Similarly, even though good technology exists now for video conferencing, skype, googlewave and other collaborative tools, most business people still prefer to jump into the Beamer to go somewhere, or pick up the phone or play golf. I sometimes include myself in this group.
Nevertheless, I would say that Twitter is very effective at driving traffic to websites especially from blogs. If an intelligent marketing campaign is crafted that includes all the online media – websites,video,social media and blogging, then you have a very powerful new tool.