BEST PRACTICE BRIEF: Twitter Cheat

 BEST PRACTICE BRIEF: Twitter Cheat 

Twitter is still a relatively new medium in the marketing world, but is growing by leaps and
bounds – daily! Learn what works and what doesn’t with these simple tips to help you develop
an effective Twitter program.
1. Be consistent. Twitter is new and cool, but you should still treat it like your other marketing
tools. As with other campaigns, goals and standards need to be developed and messaging
should be consistent from medium to medium.
2. Stay true to your branding. Trying to develop a new “voice” to fit in is likely to backfire.
Remain true to your brand voice and messaging.
3. Set clear expectations for your team. Before implementing a Twitter campaign and presence
make sure that each individual on the team understands the goals of the program. Be
clear as to who is supposed to respond and within what time frame.
4. Leverage best practices. Leverage existing best practices from Customer Service and internal
Communications and retrofit them for Twitter.
5. Understand the power of a mention. Each mention can represent thousands – even millions
of listeners. Take them seriously.
6. Be concise. A tweet is limited to 140 characters so you need to make each character count
and get the most pertinent information to your following.
7. Schedule is important. Knowing your objectives will assist you in developing a schedule
for tweeting. If you are using Twitter for customer service, you will tweet as often as there
are customer inquiries. If is for awareness and traffic driving, you may only tweet as there
is news on your business. That does not however mean that you can get lazy. Frequency is
important to keeping the attention of your followers.
8. Think beyond marketing. Companies are beginning to use Twitter as a customer service
tool that allows customers to quickly contact the company to resolve problems. ComcastCares
is perhaps one of the best examples with 49,734 followers as of January 2011.
(http://twitter.com/comcastcares) It’s a great tool but (and this is a big “but”) only if the
company follows and responds to tweets on a very timely basis.
9. Don’t forget to measure. While tweeting is useless if you are not actively tracking and
measuring its benefit. Whether you leverage social monitoring tools to get a full run of
conversations or use the Twitter interface, make sure you know how the social network is
responding to your business.