I’ve been updating the Twitter Brand Index regularly — I’m excited to see new companies, particularly those in the legal industry, establish a presence. In an effort to establish best practices within this new space, the following elements were created after an examiniation of companies in the index. (Note: This is a work in progress; I’ve love to collaborate with others on this initiative.)
The list after the break…
“Good” Practices within the space (”Let’s define Best practices as more companies join twitter and engage the community)
Followers
- To leverage any social application, it’s necessary to connect with other people. Gaining followers is an important part of joining the conversation. Both content and a readily avilable audience will impact your followers.
- Keep in mind your organization may setup a policy of not following others, particularly through a branded twitter account. Many users do this, including @cnn.
Branding
- Twitter allows for a great degree of customization: profile information, thumbnail image, background image and colors. Use your corporate branding policy to define the space… there are several great examples in this space. Depending on your organization’s culture, let the nature of twitter impact your design. More conservative organizations will likely recreate marketing-driven designs.
Content
- Responsive — Addresses customer concerns and questions. @HRBlock; who doesn’t have questions about taxes.
- Interactive — Executives and thought-leaders interact with the community. See @missusP, head of PerkettPRsuasion.
- Promotional — Provide promotional offers and details. Retailers, such as @woot.
- Informational — Publish information for users; often includes off-site links. Any news source, like @ABAjournal or @cnn.
Keep in mind these categories aren’t mutually exclusive. @zappos, managed by the CEO Tony Hsieh, uses twitter for promotions and interaction with customers, including service issues (Responsive”).
Frequency of Tweets
- Another of what I believe is a no-brainer: to engage in conversation, you must participate! The frequency of your tweets is tied to the nature of your content. The following scale outlines what might be a frequency index (to be used as a general guideline):
More frequent
Interactive
Responsive
Informational
Promotional
Less frequent
- Try not to annoy your community. I’ve seen several flare-ups between users… as an organization, treat twitter as you would any other social application (including those offline).
Policy
- One quick note on policy related concerns. If your organization does not have a policy for official social media, get one in place before joining the community. Coming from a law-firm background, policy and use are very important, but considering the use in other environments, such as blogs, this may not be a great concern.
More to come!
“Try not to annoy your community. I’ve seen several flare-ups between users… as an organization, treat twitter as you would any other social application (including those offline).”
This is an issue for me. I’m more interested in following individuals and not corporations or “twitter alerts” (such as @cnn). The individuals, though, treat themselves as commodities and feel as though they need to market themselves as such.
They then confuse followers because you will receive a mix and match of tweets. The fact that the individual is “streaming live now” and wants to chat with you, blogging, and eating a cheese sandwich makes me as a follower uncomfortable and unwilling to interact with them.
I would prefer that those individuals that are attempting to market themselves and their Internet-famous personalities stick to just posting about what interests them personally and interacting with followers. I am more inclined to follow those individuals beyond Twitter to the other content that the individual is participating in.
Good point! This raises a few operational concerns:
1. Could the corporate presence be compromised by “cheese sandwiches?”
2. Could the departure of the marketer, if used interactively, represent a risk? How could this be managed?
3. How can a company participate on twitter in a meaningful way without annying users. Perhaps value-added promotions (promo + informational) could get around the sense that it might become a running commercial, something I’m against.