Companies and inviduals alike have been flocking to Twitter. Many companies are using Twitter to enage their customers in meaningful conversations, helping with support issues and questions, and gathering feedback to improve their products and services. But some companies are just using Twitter as another broadcast medium, which can actually be harmful. When using Twitter for business here’s what you shouldn’t do:
- Talk only about your company and products – Twitter is a social media for having conversations (that means two-way communication).
- Ignore what people are saying about you – Twitter gives your customers a voice. Pay attention to what they’re saying.
- Fail to Respond – For very large companies with many followers, it can be difficult to respond to every request, but you should try as hard as possible.
- Talk about inappropriate subjects – This happens most often when personal and business subjects mix, but it could also be talking about controversial subjects. Just keep in mind that whatever you say is out there for everyone to see.
- Sell to followers – Obviously some self-promotion is fine, but it should not be the main use of your Twitter account. And you shouldn’t direct message every follower with links to your product or promotions.
- Ask for contacts – If people are interested in your products or services, they’ll contact you. If you provide useful and helpful information, people will start to follow you. People are very protective of their coworkers, friends and family, so don’t violate their trust.
- Ask people to promote your stuff – If they find what you say valuable enough, they’ll tell others. Asking for a rt occasionally may be ok, but constantly bugging people to promote you will just annoy them.
- Don’t do anything constructive with feedback – Your customers are offering feedback because they care (if they didn’t, they wouldn’t bother). If you don’t do anything useful with the feedback, they’ll stop giving it and it’ll be much more difficult to satisfy them.
- Take more than you give – If you fail to offer useful and helpful information, offer support and wisdom, and give information, your customers will stop listening and go elsewhere.
I think a lot of it comes down to acting the same on Twitter as you would in person.
(photo by hansvandenberg30)
Technorati tags: social media, brand, social networking, business, marketing strategy, marketing
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Ever see a set of words in different sizes which are all links on a site? It’s probably a keyword cloud. These clouds try to give a visual representation of what the site is about. Sometimes they’re based on tags, which the writer of the content uses to categorize their content (these are . Often they are based only on the words the site – the keywords – the words that are mentioned the most often are represented by the largest size. The problem is these keyword clouds often falsely represent the true content of a site. Keywords are not intelligent. They don’t know that a story about – they don’t know about context or associations. Keywords are dumb.
In his post yesterday,