IN THIS CHAPTER

Putting your business on Twitter

Using Twitter to make your business look good

Creating a network on Twitter and communicating with it

Getting and giving useful information on Twitter

This chapter covers some of the essentials of using Twitter for marketing in your business, explains what some other businesses have tried, and points you in the right direction to get started yourself.

Understanding the Business of Twitter

Twitter has the potential to filter into every possible aspect of business as a versatile communications platform and problem-solving tool. It has uses way beyond the marketing and customer-engagement layer. Twitter can affect pretty much everything, from the way enterprise software works to how project status is shared. It can fundamentally change communication and problem-solving, as well as match resources, accommodate human-resources challenges, and lower expenses.

Twitter can have powerful effects on personal and professional networks. Sales professionals can use it to generate leads, journalists can locate sources, publishers can discover new content, and any business can create better relationships with customers. You can listen to and harness the massive flow of ideas and information passing through Twitter so that you can advance your business objectives.

You can use Twitter to create ad-hoc communities, organize and publicize live events, or extend an experience to a remote audience. You can sell directly — if you do it right — or you can just develop an inexpensive listening and conversation post among the very people whose problems your business solves. You can use Twitter to generate traffic to your business’s website. You can use it to solicit feedback. It can even make your company and brands easier for users to find on search engines such as Google.

To get started, let’s take a look at some ways Twitter might fit with your brand.

Putting Your Best Face Forward

Businesses can use Twitter to talk to their customers and potential customers, and generally increase brand recognition. Given that Twitter has so many potential uses that are so diverse, how can you get started?

You can probably guess that your profile is your business’s face on Twitter. Even though many people use Twitter through a service on their phone or desktop rather than through the web page itself, assume that most everyone will at least look at your profile page — if not the web URL that you provide within that profile — before deciding whether or not to follow what you’re doing on Twitter.

Dress nicely on Twitter: Fill out the whole profile page when you set up your business’s Twitter account, and upload an avatar. (In most cases, your company logo is appropriate, but in others, a photo of your team or customers could be better.) Link back to your main website, and link to your Twitter account from your website. You need to verify that the business account is actually yours and promote the availability of the Twitter stream to all your customers. With a Twitter stream widget embedded on your site, you can even tweet to your customers (keeping freshly updated content front and center) without their even logging into Twitter.

Make sure that the Twitter bio section, short though it may be, tells Twitter users about your business. Also, the content of your business’s tweets needs to honestly, transparently show what you’re doing on Twitter. Perhaps you’d like to introduce the people behind your business’s Twitter account; they’re the people your Twitter readers and connections actually talk to, so you could let the individuals behind the keyboard shine through.

After you create a great profile page, what do you do? Here are a few simple ways to get out of the Twitter background and into public awareness:

• Listen. Pay attention to what’s going on around you on Twitter. Twitter users have fascinating things to say about pretty much everything, but more important for you, they may already be talking about you and your business. You’re going to want to find as many ways as you can to tune in. You can get useful information from Twitter in many ways, from Twitter Search to sophisticated social media listening tools. If you think of Twitter as a giant consumer sentiment engine, you can start to understand its potential. You can learn a lot by listening.

• Balance. For the average business Twitter account, you need to have a good ratio of personal (or conversational) tweets to business (or promotional) ones. This ratio depends, in part, on how much you interact on Twitter and what you hope to accomplish — not to mention the nature of your business and your target audience or customer base.

  You may want to come up with an approximate numerical ratio that accomplishes your balance goals. You could decide, for example, that you want to make only one or two of every ten tweets personal. Alternatively, you can opt to put a particularly personal or original slant on promotional tweets, making them notably funny, valuable, or interesting to your readers.

  If you have a more conversational Twitter account that you still want to connect to your professional life, make about half your tweets personal, fun, or off-topic, and the other half about your business. If you prefer to deliver business value all the time, set up your account to curate and cultivate links about events, blog posts, news, and ideas that are relevant to your field. You can also sprinkle in some self-promotional tweets, but make sure it’s not the only thing you do. Even when you share things about your company, make an effort to show how what you’re sharing relates to your readers. Whatever you do, be useful. Offer value. You want to keep people engaged, which is what Twitter is all about.

• Engage. While you listen and talk on Twitter, be sure to interact with other Twitter users. Twitter is a communications tool, and although it’s based on a one-to-many concept, it works best when you make friends and have real conversations right in the Twitter stream. Sometimes when you find people talking about subjects relevant to your business, you can offer helpful contributions to their conversations. When it comes to business, public relations, and customer service (which we talk about in the following sections), you absolutely need to engage other people on Twitter.
• Connect. Use the ability to take conversations offline and into the real world via tweetups, events, and meetings to your business’s advantage. Twitter makes finding ways to meet and engage with customers in real life easy, and therein lies its largest business value. Take your business’s conversations and connections beyond the 140-character limit.

Public relations

You can use Twitter as a fantastic public relations (PR) channel, whatever kind of business you work for. It offers global reach, endless connections, networking opportunities, a promotion platform, and immediate event planning and feedback. Best of all, if you float your ideas out there in genuine, valid, and interesting ways, others can pick them up and spread them around. Many Twitter users — from individuals to large corporations — report scoring numerous press opportunities as a result of engaging other Twitter users and sharing on the Twitter platform.

Some traditional public relations firms may be intimidated by Twitter’s potential to connect stories, sources, and journalists. Many of them don’t yet see the opportunity, or they’re thinking about it too narrowly. Twitter is just one more tool — albeit a powerful and efficient one — to add to your arsenal if public relations is important to your business. Twitter simply gives you a way to make what you do more accessible to people who might otherwise not hear your message.

Twitter has introduced a revolutionary new way that journalists can report on the news in real-time. One New York City–based startup called Muck Rack (http://muckrack.com) realized this early and jumped on the Twitter bandwagon, taking real-time news and allowing you to filter and analyze that news. The platform includes a tracking tool that emails you when a journalist tweets about a specific or relevant term. This means that instead of your searching the Internet to find a specific story, that story now comes to you.

It’s possible that you heard about Twitter in the first place in the context of a mainstream news story about an event of global importance that was first reported via citizen journalism on Twitter. One of the most famous examples of this occurred in January 2009 after the emergency landing of a commercial airplane in the Hudson River (https://twitter.com/jkrums/status/1121915133). Indeed, Twitter is an exceedingly powerful tool for detecting breaking events. You don’t always get in-depth analysis (at least, not until links to longer writings about the story begin to spread), but you do frequently find yourself way ahead of the game when a story breaks if you’re on Twitter.

Another noteworthy example of news breaking on Twitter was during the Boston Marathon bombings in April 2013 (see Figure 1-1). The Boston Globe (@BostonGlobe) was the first to tweet an accurate update about the news (https://twitter.com/BostonGlobe/status/323873235949207552). Then, several other marathon attendees and participants followed by tweeting images of the mass chaos that broke out, including photos and videos of police helping wounded victims. It wasn’t before long that the Boston Police Department (@bostonpolice) tweeted a picture of the bombing suspects from their own account (https://twitter.com/bostonpolice/status/325002310369542144) and asked for help with identifying them. All this real-time tweeting and live footage actually led to successfully identifying and capturing the suspects.

It’s not every day that you see news stories such as the airplane in the Hudson River or the Boston Marathon bombings. However, even on a regular day, journalists and PR practitioners are among some of Twitter’s most avid users, and they do some pretty interesting things with it. On Monday nights, professionals from both fields gather to talk about current stories, their professions, and the future of media simply by tagging their tweets with the word #journchat. Because #journchat is an agreed-on tag and a longstanding event, people know to point their search tools (or https://twitter.com/search-home) to that word and watch the conversation scroll by.

It was Twitter innovator @prsarahevans who came up with the idea for #journchat, and the community she built catapulted her from obscure community-college public relations practitioner to an extremely well-known social media innovator. National Public Radio (@NPR) implemented a similar standing event that used #NPRWIT to extend its voice beyond radio broadcasts.

Because Twitter usernames are short and frequently easy to remember, they can be a powerful way to introduce people and pass along contact information. In an interview, a reporter was surprised how easily Laura could rattle off half a dozen sources that the reporter might like to talk to. Armed with these Twitter handles, the journalist used the profiles behind those usernames to get a quick snapshot of those users’ interests, abilities, and points of view, plus links to further detailed information about them and easy ways to make contact.

Here are some tips to make your Twitter-based public relations more user-friendly and successful:

• Keep it real. The “Be genuine” Twitter rule applies at all times, even when you’re embarking on a publicity campaign (often especially when you’re attempting to drive sales or awareness to your product, service, or site). Twitter’s users can be very turned off by empty marketing banter.
• Remember your balance. Just because you want to see fast results doesn’t mean that you should bombard your Twitter followers with link spam (numerous tweets that contain links to your business) or constant nagging about whatever you’re trying to promote. Remember to space it out. On Twitter, overly aggressive promotions can slow your progress and reduce your audience. Tread with respect.
• Give your idea wings. Come up with a pithy or witty statement about your promotion that inspires people in your network to share and pass it along (to retweet the statement, or RT) to their own networks. Getting your message retweeted is much more effective than hammering your point home on your own.
• Be genuinely helpful. Watch for conversations about topics relevant to your company or product, and provide unselfish solutions, ideas, and help to those conversations.
• Listen to feedback. If someone asks you a question, answer it in your own public feed so that you can continue to generate organic interest in your promotion. Answer others who happen to tweet related questions, but make sure that your answers aren’t selfish or too pushy. How can you tell? Pay attention to how effective your efforts are.
• Measure effectiveness. Do people click your links? Do they retweet your messages without your having to ask? Do they complain that you’re being promotional — or, worse, do they not say much at all? Use trackable link shorteners such as Bitly so that you can see which of your tweets people are bothering to click or retweet (passing your messages along for you). Sometimes, you may need to tweet a little less frequently to avoid letting spamminess make you less effective. Want to really dig into some data about your effectiveness? Cruise on over to https://analytics.twitter.com and have a look around. By exporting your data, you can even see in great detail which tweets get the most impressions, engagement, favorites, retweets, click throughs, and more.
• Offer incentives. Not giveaways or money, but value. Give people an unselfish reason to pay attention to you. It takes more than just promotions. Followers listen to you for the value you add, and if you consistently add insightful and worthwhile thoughts to their Twitter streams, they’ll be there for you when the roles reverse and you need them.

Twitter provides all users access to influential journalists, bloggers, writers, and people from all walks of life. If you use it consistently and well, you can find powerful, inexpensive ways to share messages that help solve people’s problems and gain visibility for your work.

Customer service

Big-name companies such as Comcast, Nike, and JetBlue use Twitter as part of an overall strategy to reinvent their reputations for poor customer service and turn things around for their brands.

How did they do it? More important, how can you do it? Comcast has a few Twitter accounts that are specifically designed to receive customer service inquiries: @comcastcares and @ComcastWill are both run by Will Osborne, and @ComcastBill is run by Bill Gerth, both Comcast employees specializing in customer service. Although these accounts don’t schedule or tweet any broadcast messages, all three are very active in the Tweets & Replies section of their accounts, where they have many 1-1 conversations going on with frustrated or confused customers.

Another example of a brand that has a separate Twitter handle for support-related inquiries is Nike at @NikeSupport. In the Twitter bio you’ll see that this Nike account supports seven different languages (English, Spanish, French, Dutch, Italian, German, and Japanese), which truly makes this account a global source of help for anyone having trouble with a Nike device or product.

Although many brands create separate Twitter accounts for support-related matters, JetBlue has chosen to use its main account for both marketing and support. The company simply vows to always respond quickly and use humor when it’s appropriate (see Figure 1-2 as an example). The benefit of using your main account is that customers won’t get confused as to which Twitter handle they should be tweeting to when a question or issue comes up. This also means that any praise or positive messages will come directly to the @JetBlue account instead of only negative problems.

All three of these brands got in the trenches of social media through Twitter and engaged their customer bases, facing criticisms and complaints head-on, and showing a desire to help and respond quickly without making excuses or shifting blame. Twitter users around the world can witness this transformation and watch the companies respond to others’ complaints, which improves the companies’ images for even more people.

By listening diligently for mentions of their companies and quickly extending a helping hand, Comcast, Nike, and JetBlue have generated substantial goodwill (not to mention press coverage). Even when the products and services sold under those brands elicit unpleasant reactions from the public, having a real person reach out to help in a public forum can do a lot to prevent or dissipate consumer anger. Used artfully, one-to-one contact via Twitter instills a sense of hope that the people behind the company walls aren’t leaving customers hanging. A presence and timely responses on Twitter can make the difference between a firestorm of complaints and a quickly managed situation.

Customer service on Twitter allows businesses to catch consumers in their moments of frustration and help them right away. But Twitter alone can’t fix back-end customer-service infrastructure problems such as overloaded call centers or poorly trained representatives who have no real power to help.

You don’t need to be a huge company (and you certainly don’t need to be suffering from a bad reputation) to create an effective business presence on Twitter. Twitter provides a great customer-service channel for small and medium-size businesses, too. If you’re at a small company, Twitter can broaden your ability to reach out widely and listen carefully at almost no expense (only some time and possibly tools) while saving you the cost of having an entire customer-service department. Having a Twitter account for your business can make your business more accessible, not to mention let you help people who have real problems in real time, and see instant improvement in how consumers perceive your business.

When you first dive into Twitter for customer service, you may see negativity about your company, particularly at first. Keep going. The best part about Twitter as a customer-service channel is how you get feedback when a customer leaves satisfied. Many satisfied customers send out thank-you tweets that all their contacts see, which gives you instant good public relations buzz — and that kind of buzz is priceless. Letting go of control (you don’t necessarily have control anymore anyhow) of your brand and engaging publicly with dissatisfied customers can really get that goodwill going.

Networking on Twitter

Whether you do it via Twitter or an old-fashioned card file, your business, personal, and career success depends heavily on a little thing called your network. If you’re looking for ways to network more effectively — or you want to find interesting, valuable people efficiently — Twitter can help you build up a genuinely interesting, astonishingly relevant, and powerful network. Entire new horizons of opportunity can open up when you finally connect with the people who are right for you. Building a network comes naturally on Twitter. The platform makes it easy to interact and connect with people and businesses that share your interests and goals, and because of @replies and other links between Twitter networks and Twitter users, to randomly interact with and discover interesting new people along the way.

The more you interact on Twitter, the more your network increases. You can build almost any specific type of network on Twitter, too. Twitter offers access to all levels of people and businesses, from those seeking work or a better social life to CEOs and national politicians. It even offers a level of transparency that erases normal boundaries and rivalries.

Twitter can also help business networking in the employment sector. It’s a fantastic way to meet and evaluate new employees, and also to find new work. This Twitter job-hunting movement creates a more open and flexible hiring environment for all kinds of companies. You can observe potential employees while they talk about what they know, get referrals from people who know them, and introduce yourself — all in real time. Twitter also efficiently harnesses networks of loose ties — the friends of friends who are more likely to know about job opportunities and job candidates.

Freelancers who network and collaborate on projects can use Twitter to find former colleagues from past companies with whom they lost touch, and to get to know their existing employees and customers. In so many ways, Twitter acts as a portable business-networking event that you can pop into when the time and availability suit you. Bonus: You don’t have to talk to anyone you don’t want to talk to.

Building Brand Awareness

If you’re planning on using Twitter to help grow your business, one of your goals might be to simply increase awareness of your brand’s existence. By building up your brand’s reputation on Twitter, you’re fostering a space for your followers to find entertainment or helpful information. It’s important to give folks passing by a reason to actually click Follow, so they come back and keep reading, and eventually might want to pass a mention of your brand along to their friends.

Three examples of consumer products making waves on Twitter are @OldSpice, @Charmin, and @Skittles. These three brands tend to take a more humorous and likeable approach in order to build brand awareness and grow their following. These brands are constantly getting retweeted due to their non sales-oriented tweets that include funny pop culture references, clever use of trending hashtags, or seemingly risqué interactions with other brands.

Take Figure 1-3 as an example of two brands interacting with each other on Twitter. Here, you’ll see that Old Spice tweeted a funny thought that its target audience would enjoy. Notice that this tweet is just for fun and doesn’t include a 140-character sales pitch. Taco Bell comes back with an equally humorous thought to keep the conversation going, and Old Spice follows up once more. This quick exchange on Twitter, although seemingly “just for fun,” helped both brands gain visibility, new followers, and generally become more loveable due to the high number of times the thread was retweeted and the fact that the interaction became “news” that was picked up by blogs and other publications.

Similar to the Old Spice and Taco Bell example in Figure 1-3, Old Spice was involved in another brand-on-brand Twitter interaction with Oreo in December 2013 — just in time for the holidays (https://twitter.com/Oreo/status/413852283651510272). This interaction helped show product function and versatility in a humorous way.

Building up a reputation and a following like @OldSpice, @Charmin, and @Skittles might take some time, but with the right strategy in place you could certainly get there. Remember that you don’t need to build a giant audience; you just need to build a well-targeted and engaged one. A smaller scale example of using humor to build a following is @CrapTaxidermy, an account that started by posting pictures of taxidermy gone wrong.

Offering Promotions and Generating Leads

If you represent a company that has something to sell, you can find a unique home on Twitter. You may need to adjust your messages a bit so that you can shift from a hard-sell philosophy to an attitude of interaction and engagement that doesn’t necessarily follow a direct path to a sale. But after you find and flip that switch from “talking at” to “talking with” potential customers, people on Twitter can interact with and respond to your company’s information ideas and products in ways that often lead to benefits for both sides.

You can sell-without-selling just about anything on Twitter. Whether you want to sell something large (such as used cars) or something small (such as shoes), you can probably find people on Twitter who need and want them. These potential customers have questions for you about your item, your company, your staff, and you, and you can let them talk to you on Twitter about their concerns. You’re in business because you solve problems and fulfill needs for people. Spend your time on Twitter being useful and informative about the types of problems you solve, and the rest really does follow.

Some brands “sell-without-selling” by using Twitter as a point of entry to a long buyer’s journey, rather than trying to earn immediate action. One example of this is @Lowes on the business-to-consumer (B2C) side. Of course Lowes tweets last-minute deals such as “Get $100 off a Dyson vacuum — today only!” but they also post creative photos and Vine videos that lead users to helpful blog articles for home remodeling or even the Kitchen Planner Guide. If you’re looking to turn your Twitter account into a return on investment (ROI) engine, take a page from Lowes’ book.

On the business-to-business (B2B) side, a great example of entering a long buyer’s journey through Twitter is @HubSpot. Because this is a B2B company, the term generally used here is “lead generation.” Let’s walk through an example of how HubSpot might generate leads using Twitter. First, the account tweets a helpful blog post, possibly including an eye-catching photo or additional media. After a Twitter user clicks the link in the tweet, she’s led to a helpful blog post such as “How to Use Twitter for Business.” When the reader scrolls through the post, she sees a call-to-action (CTA) to download a free e-book. This e-book generally expands on the blog post topic. When the reader clicks the CTA and reaches the landing page for the free e-book, she sees a form to enter her contact information in exchange for free information. From here, HubSpot follows up with relevant emails and other forms of helpful communication in hopes of “nurturing” her as a lead and building a relationship until she is closer to being ready to buy.

If you’d prefer to stick to Twitter-only promotions, take a page from the @DunkinDonuts book. This account hosts endless contests and sweepstakes, including #DunkinAppSweeps, #PumpkinatDunkinSweeps, and #DDCaptionThis. Often, these contests are quite simple: unscramble a phrase, caption a photo, and tweet your answer to the hashtag. Prizes include gift packs, free food products, or even cash. What Dunkin’ Donuts gets out of these contests are new followers, awareness to the company’s Twitter account and hashtags, loads of engagement, devoted fans, and ultimately more sales.

Running a contest isn’t the only way to offer promotions on Twitter. @JetBlueCheeps is an account dedicated to posting limited-time deals for last-minute flights. Because Twitter is such a fast-moving, real-time network, this is the perfect place to post deals on the fly for avid and spontaneous travelers. Suddenly, this Twitter account feels like an exclusive all access ticket to peek at JetBlue’s best-kept secret. People following this account can even receive SMS text updates to their phones whenever JetBlue posts a new deal.

You can replicate these companies’ successes by keeping these tips in mind:

• Be interesting.
• Be accessible.
• Be genuine (mean what you say).
• Be yourself.
• Don’t hard-sell.
• Don’t link spam.
• Follow the 90/10 rule: 90 percent unselfish tweets to 10 percent promotional tweets.

Promoting Bands and Artists

If you’re in any way in the business of creating, whether it’s art, music, film, photography, or what-have-you, Twitter can become a home away from home. Twitter users are incredibly receptive to creative people who tweet. Just ask Miley Cyrus (@MileyCyrus). The former teen idol turned racy pop singer had a childish image. She’d been the star of Hannah Montana on the Disney Channel, and nobody was taking her seriously as a young adult. But she joined Twitter around the same time that she drastically changed her look and dropped her album and tour called Bangerz. Throughout this transformation, she shared updates (bizarre photos included) with her followers on Twitter to let the world see another side of her.

Cyrus is a pretty drastic example of how you can use Twitter for rebranding, marketing, and self-promotion as an artist, but Twitter can also help relatively unknown people make it to the top for the first time.

Twitter also helps artists such as Natasha Wescoat (@natasha) increase their prominence in the art world. Wescoat’s work is finding a home in art galleries, movies, and more, and she can attribute some of that increasing reach to contacts that she made on Twitter.

How can you (as an aspiring musician, artist, photographer, or other person who makes a living in the creative industries) find success on Twitter if you aren’t already on the level of Miley Cyrus (@MileyCyrus), MC Hammer (@MCHammer), Taylor Swift (@taylorswift13), Lady Gaga (@LadyGaga), and Justin Timberlake (@jtimberlake)? Here are some simple tips that you can follow:

• Surround yourself with successful people. Not just others in your profession or field who are more successful than you — people in other fields or areas of creativity who inspire you, too. You can start to find them by finding out which of your real-world contacts in the industry are on Twitter or by doing a few Twitter searches to find like-minded people while you build your network.
• Take it offline. Take the connections that you make on Twitter and organize events and get-togethers that bring the experience offline. You can also find out about other members’ tweetups that are relevant to your business. In creative industries, the talent is what counts, and so real-world connections can really lead to new opportunities, fan segments, and opportunities to build your loyal fan base.

• Share your content. You don’t have to give away all your hard work, but put your music, art, videos, or other work out there for people to sample and play with. Start a SoundCloud (https://soundcloud.com) channel, upload a short video to YouTube, offer free MP3s on your website, or set up a page that features a few Creative Commons–licensed photos. Whatever you do, give people a way to take a look or have a listen so that they can get to know you and what you make.

  Creative Commons (http://creativecommons.org) is an organization that makes it easy for people to license their work so that they retain their copyright but allow it to be shared. For more information on how Creative Commons works, go to http://creativecommons.org/about.

• Tweet on the go. Give your fans and potential fans a look backstage, in the van, behind the canvas, on tour, or behind the lens. Take them with you by tweeting while you travel with your music, art, film, or other creative medium. Also, let them know where you are. Many fellow Twitter users would love to hang out with you if you happen to be in town.
• Engage your fan base. Don’t just post static links to content or schedule changes. Talk to your fans and respond to them through Twitter. They probably want to ask you about the thoughts behind your work, your experiences, and you. Let them. Answer them. Engage them in good conversation, and watch as they spread the word about your work to their friends and followers.
• Be yourself. Put a good face forward, yes, but don’t try too hard to project a persona that really isn’t authentically you. Twitter is a medium that rewards authenticity, candor, and transparency. Try too hard to put your best face forward, and you may lose yourself and stop being genuine. Twitter people notice if you aren’t being real. Don’t worry about impressing people. Just do what you do and be yourself, and the fans will follow.

Check out some of the most-followed people in each category on user-generated Twitter directory Wefollow (http://wefollow.com). Categories include musicians (http://wefollow.com/interest/music), TV personalities (http://wefollow.com/interest/tv), actors (http://wefollow.com/interest/actor), comedians (http://wefollow.com/interest/comedy), and other celebrities (http://wefollow.com/interest/celebrity).

Sharing Company Updates

If you have a new or growing company that you want to introduce to the world through Twitter, start a separate account for the company. You may find balancing traditional corporate professionalism with the level of transparency that Twitter users have come to expect to be a little tricky sometimes, so keep these guidelines in mind when you start your new account:

• Provide value to the Twitter community. Your company account can become a source of news, solutions, ideas, entertainment, or information that’s more than just a series of links to products and services. Educate your Twitter followers. Reach out to people whom you can genuinely and unselfishly help. You can even offer sales incentives for products, in the way that @DellOutlet does, as long as what you offer has genuine value. Establish your company’s leadership in providing ideas, solutions, and innovation.
• Be human. Most brands use their company logo as their Twitter avatar to keep things official, but they’ll add a little personality to their header photo or individual tweets. A commonly favored approach is to let your followers become familiar with who’s behind the company voice; it makes them feel more engaged. Take photos of your company during team outings to show off the culture, or tweet a dorky industry joke here and there. Humans like to talk to other humans, so make sure your brand doesn’t feel robotic.
• Don’t spam. Don’t flood the Twitter feed with self-promotional links or product information that don’t deliver genuine value to readers. Whether self-promotional or not, you never want to clog up people’s Twitter streams with irrelevant information. You might not talk about your cat or your marriage on a company account, but you can still make it personal. Profile an employee, talk about milestones for employees, or talk about what’s going on in your office. You can even hold tweetups at your office and invite your followers to stop by, as Boston’s NPR news station WBUR (@WBUR) does. This approach gives people a peek at what makes your company run.

Before tweeting in earnest for your company, it’s a good idea to openly discuss your plans to demonstrate that you’re taking a productive, innovative approach and to prevent any misguided fears that joining Twitter means you will somehow suddenly start to leak sensitive company information or otherwise break reasonable corporate policies. As with any public communications platform, you do need to consider just how much you can say about what goes on inside your business. Transparency is key, but you don’t want to disclose industry secrets in a public forum. Every company has a different style. It helps to have a good plan in place and make sure that the employees assigned to the company Twitter account are trustworthy and have solid judgment.

Building Community

Community-building sometimes suffers from a “Kumbaya” perception that devalues the importance of using tools such as Twitter to connect with people. But building a truly engaged community is extremely valuable.

Apple is an example of a company that benefits tremendously from its engaged community in terms of promotion, sales, and even customer support administered from one Apple fan directly to others. Apple built its community by building great products people get passionate about, not by worrying about any particular tools. So as you approach the Twitter opportunity, remember how powerful and engaged community can be and remember what people actually engage around — the things they really and truly care about.

At its best, the community concept of sharing and connecting can help you spread a positive image and good comments about your company; done wrong, it can veer into feel-good, self-help banter that’s ultimately empty. Again, don’t fuss too much about Twitter as a tool. Think more strategically about the community and what they care about and engage them with substance and real contributions.

Building a community is not necessarily the same as building a network:

• Network: Your network is there for you and your business, a kind of foundation for concrete professional growth.
• Community: Building a community means inspiring the people who follow you on Twitter to embrace your brand and create a feeling of solidarity around your business, service, staff, or product.

With a community, you can build a loyal corps of evangelists: people who are passionate about your brand, even though they have no professional or financial stake in the company. If you can engender the community feeling through your use of Twitter and how you interact with your customers, your customers begin to feel emotionally invested in your success online.

You can see this community feeling with JetBlue. The Twitter users who follow the airline are so dedicated that they act like they’re legitimately invested in the brand’s success. JetBlue fosters this effect by staying on top of what people on Twitter are saying about them, or about flights and traveling in general, through the use of monitoring tools. Then they jump in with help, as needed. If you tweet about having trouble finding a flight, for example, you can expect a JetBlue employee to send you a direct message (DM) or @reply in less than a day that includes links to the proper pages on the JetBlue site. Plus, JetBlue has spent so much time building a strong community that Twitter members who don’t even work for JetBlue will routinely pass along information they see or hear and will even reach out on behalf of the company and connect potential customers with JetBlue.com.

Community is also a huge aspect of the Twitter experiences of many musicians and artists, such as Imogen Heap (@ImogenHeap) and John Mayer (@JohnMayer). Heap uses Twitter to interact more directly with her fan base, which increases the loyalty of her listeners, who have come to see a more human side of her and feel like they’ve even come to know her. If someone tweets something about Heap that her Twitter followers don’t like, you can watch the community leap to her defense. At the same time, tweets from her Twitter community usually reflect the tone of her own calm tweets, remaining mellow and not shrill.

Musicians, actors, and other celebrities are really personality-based businesses, and bringing forth those personalities on Twitter by asking questions and sharing parts of their lives cements a valuable engagement between the artist and fans.

You can build community through

• Offering genuine interaction
• Asking questions
• Being honest and transparent
• Following people back who follow you
• Not overautomating
• Being more than a link list
• Providing value

Conducting Research

Twitter is an excellent tool for crowdsourcing and focus-group research. You can easily get the answers you seek after you establish a relationship with your followers that encourages participation, conversation, and sharing. Larger corporations are continually diving in to conduct their own research and build their own tools that can make sense of the tremendous amount of data being generated on Twitter all the time.

If you’re willing to experiment with different ways to watch the Twitter stream, you can collect passive data (what people happen to be mentioning), do active research (asking questions and conducting polls), and even engage actual focus groups and ad-hoc communities in live events.

As you build your network and start gaining more followers on Twitter, it becomes a very useful tool for informal conversational research. If you ask a really good question and send it into the world with a #hashtag to make the answers easier to find, you can even do research with a very small following, because the tag attracts curious bystanders who may later become new followers. As you ask questions, you can use any number of polling tools or even a simple manually generated tracking system (such as a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet) to collect the answers and data that you receive.

Twitter can be thought of as a global, human-powered, mobile phone–enabled sensing and signaling network. What Twitter knows about the world is pretty incredible, and when businesses understand how to work with that information, the combination can contribute toward closing some pretty important gaps in our economy between supply and demand.

Going Transparent

Transparency is a crucial marketing buzzword for some businesses and a scary reality for others. Lest you think we’re asking you to live out that unpleasant dream in which you forget to wear your pants to school, relax. Transparency doesn’t require exposing company data to corporate spies or baring your soul for the Internet. More than anything else, it simply means being honest, disclosing your biases, admitting to mistakes, and not trying to force your message and spin on everyone all the time.

Although many Twitter users find themselves becoming more casual in their use of the service over time, you need to find your own personal comfort level between acting like a real person and oversharing. After you find that line for yourself, your business, and your employees, being genuine and transparent on Twitter becomes second nature. Transparency fosters trust and relationships. It’s no secret that people like to work with people they like.

Here’s how to achieve transparency:

• Release control. Stop worrying about what might happen to your brand. Instead, listen to what your customers are trying to tell you and respond to that feedback. The truth is, you haven’t been able to control your message for a while now; you just may not have known it.

  Look at the hashtags #McDStories and #AmazonFail. In the former example, McDonald’s attempted to start a cute hashtag sharing warm and fuzzy stories about the brand; it failed spectacularly when stories about poor restaurant conditions and pictures of questionable food started surfacing. McDonald’s customers used Twitter to express their anger and ultimately got the campaign suspended. The Amazon Fail incident happened when books pertaining to gay and lesbian themes were suddenly pulled from the online retailer’s bestseller lists. Again, Twitter users smelled something fishy and instantly started spreading the word. Both companies learned from going through this process that a better Twitter listening practice would have helped them address concerns early and prevent a conflagration.

• Admit to problems. When you acknowledge that your business and you occasionally have rough patches, you can form stronger, more genuine connections with your community. That kind of open disclosure has limits when it comes to some professions. Obviously, people in the legal and medical professions, as well as government agencies, have to restrict and curtail their Twitter use because of privacy issues. But for most businesses, honesty is the best policy.
• Reach out continually. Don’t stop seeking out the customers who are talking about you and reaching out to them. That personal touch goes very far in establishing and maintaining a positive perception of your business or brand.
• Be proactive. If you’re engaged with the community in a genuine way, people forgive most mistakes. Twitter’s community is pretty cooperative, and if you embrace it, you can be rewarded with unexpected benefits such as loyalty; advocacy; and even organic, voluntary promotion of you and your work.

Advising Employees on Tweeting

Business owners often feel some uncertainty and concern about how to manage employees so that they don’t waste time or make costly mistakes when using Twitter. Remember to apply common sense and manage based on behavior and results, not just specific tools. Your existing guidelines about email, blogs, commenting on message boards and forums, and even conversations with outside individuals cover any concerns that you have about your employees’ use of Twitter.

That said, it’s important to remember that information spreads fast on Twitter, and that Twitter is a very open and searchable public forum. Errors can — and will — go farther, faster, so the exercise of common sense is in order.

Before you start using Twitter for your business, provide staff guidance on how to use it and what to be cautious about. Twitter is extremely new to many people, and they may not be familiar with just how public and open it is. Definitely set a few ground rules to help prevent common mistakes. You can simply write a one- or two-page set of reminders or direct employees’ attention to the parts of your existing human-resources policy that cover public communications.

Make the guidelines basic, clear, and easy to follow. Here are some thoughts to get you started:

• If you wouldn’t say it in front of your parents, kids, or boss, perhaps you shouldn’t say it on Twitter.
• If you do something confidential at a company, keep private information under wraps. Respect clients’ privacy as well as your company’s.
• Respect the company brand when you’re out at tweetups (Twitter-based meetups) and events. Anyone can get quoted at any time.
• Perception is reality. Even if the complaint you tweet right after a client phone call wasn’t about the client, it can be misconstrued that way.
• Manage your time on Twitter well so that it doesn’t interfere with your workload.

Unless your business has other issues that come into play (if you work for a law firm or government agency, for example), these basic rules should be enough to keep people from abusing their time on Twitter. Customize them however you want.

Twitter can be an extremely valuable tool for building your professional team and bringing them together. You can set up meetings, tweet notes, meet customers, and more, and your staff can connect more easily by using Twitter as well. The more of a team you can build, the better you can weather any economic buffering.

Sharing Knowledge

You can use Twitter to share knowledge, collaborate inside the company and out, and gather business information and research. After you start to build a healthy network, you need to send out only a few tweets about your project, problem, or issue before people come out of the woodwork to try to help your business and you. If you haven’t been building your Twitter network, you may have to wait a while for this aspect of Twitter to become useful for you.

Suppose you come up with a major presentation about what your company does or sells, but you need something to complete it, such as a chart or a link to a relevant study. Twitter can probably help you find that missing piece. People on Twitter usually offer a helping hand when it comes to knowledge sharing, collaboration, and information gathering, especially if you spend time interacting on Twitter and building your network. Avid Twitter users are all aware of the same thing: By helping others, they can get a hand when they need it.