Twitter has become fairly popular over the last year and is a powerful tool for communicating with your customers. However, as with most business decisions, you should consider some things before you make your decision:
- Is Your Audience on Twitter? Search for some of the keywords important to your industry to see if your audience is on twitter. Even if there are only some, it may be worth at least monitoring twitter.
- What’s being said? – If your customers and industry is on Twitter. What are they saying? You can use tools such as Tweetscan, Twitscoop and Twist to take a look at conversations and keywords.
- What will the effect be on your brand and reputation? For some brands, their reputation may be negatively affected if they are not actively participating on Twitter. Everyone should be aware that anything said on Twitter will be around in the future via search engines.
- Who will tweet and monitor? It may be helpful to have multiple people using Twitter, but they should have a general idea of what is ok to say and what the plan is for using Twitter for the company.
- What persona will you use? Does your brand or company have a mascot or other persona you should use? If multiple people are tweeting, make sure they aware of any personas.
- How will you integrate Twitter with your website and other marketing efforts? Twitter makes it fairly easy to include your tweets on other websites. Where will you include it? How will you let your customers know about it?
- To follow or not to follow? When people start following you on twitter, will you follow them in turn? This may make it easier to follow conversations (and it is a nice gesture), but following unsavory feeds may not be a good idea either. Deciding on a follow policy beforehand can make it easier.
If you are already using Twitter for your business, what did you consider beforehand? What advice would you give to others who are trying to make the decision?
Technorati Tags: twitter, social networks, social media, internet marketing, internet consulting, internet business strategy
I had an interesting conversation recently about social media. It seems that a lot of business owners kind of know what it means. If you ask them about it they’ll say “oh is that like facebook or something?” or “it’s media that’s social”. But if you try to dig deeper into what that actually means you’ll get a mixture of answers.