Dave Stevenson explores how Twitter- used correctly - can bring your business closer to its customers
Twitter seems like a simple way for businesses to connect with their customers: just type in a message and send. But it’s easy to get it wrong. Tweet at the wrong time of the day and your message will be missed. Use the service as a one-way advertising channel and your audience will drift away.
And those are the relatively benign pitfalls. Allowing employees to tweet on behalf of your organisation can lead to trouble, as retailer HMV found in 2013, when a group of former employees took to the company’s feed to complain about mass firings.
Used in the correct way, however, Twitter can be a positive tool for your business. Here, we look at what you should tweet and when, plus power-user tricks such as scheduling tweets to hit your followers at the best times, and the tools you need to manage your organisation’s social media needs.
Building a following
Signing up for a Twitter account is simple, but finding the right username for your business may not be: with half a billion users signed up, there’s a chance your preferred option will have gone. Twitter won’t help you claim a name that’s already been taken unless it thinks the encroachment is misleading, and buying a username from someone else is forbidden. There are stories of organisations doing it without consequences, but failing that, a bit of creativity (adding an underscore, or appending UK, for example) should find you a unique handle.
Once you start tweeting, you want to get your tweets in front of as many people as possible. Building followers is best achieved “organically”, by replying to fellow Twitterers with relevant information or joining conversations. For example, an office furniture supply company may search for “what chair?” and weigh in with advice and offers to potential customers.
There are other ways to grow your followers. Some Twitter users simply follow vast numbers of people in the hope they’ll get a reciprocal “follow-back”. This isn’t a good look, though: following a huge number of irrelevant accounts smacks of desperation, and the ones who do follow back are unlikely to be genuinely interested in your message anyway. Growing a Twitter account organically takes time, but the result is more valuable.
What to tweet
Twitter can serve as a reminder to followers of your existence, but alone it won’t keep people following. Your tweets need to offer followers something valuable or interesting. Special offers, announcements, introductions to key members of staff - anything that rewards your followers or helps personalise your business can be useful.
Don’t be too stiff, either. Twitter is a conversational medium, so feel free to chat, ask questions and retweet items you think your followers will appreciate, even if they’re only loosely relevant to your core business. Web service Buffer (bufferapp.com) can help: its primary role is to let you queue up tweets for scheduled posting, but it also highlights existing tweets from users it thinks will fit with your normal subjects.
In certain circumstances, a picture can have far more impact than 140 characters. You might simply want to post a photo of the office cat to brighten your followers’ day, but you can also use images to post messages that wouldn’t fit into at tweet. For instance, if you’re tweeting to advertise an upcoming event, you could tweet the specifics (“The company CEO will take to the stage at 2pm”), then attach an image spelling out more details of the event. Don’t go overboard, though - big blocks of text won’t be appreciated.
Note that if your picture is too big, a letterboxed preview will be shown, and users will have to click to see the full picture. Give your images a 2:1 aspect ratio, such as 1,024 x 512, and the whole image will be immediately visible in the timeline.
Targeted tweets with TweetDeck and Hootsuite
Thanks to Twitter’s open API, there are plenty of apps available to help you get the most from the service. These range from the basic - those that allow users to see their Twitter stream without opening a browser window - to advanced client suites that support multiple users and let you schedule tw'eets and track how followers engage with you.
One of the most popular clients is TweetDeck (tweetdeck.twitter.com). Originally third-party, it was bought by Twitter in 2011, and presents data in an easy-to-navigate format. The main column, Home, shows the tweets sent by your followers, while Notifications rolls your mentions, replies, new followers and favourites into one handy stream.
What’s great about TweetDeck is that you can add your own columns, including real-time search results for specific phrases. To set this up, click Add Column I Search, then type the word or phrase you want to search for and tap Enter. You’ll see a dialog box allowing you to refine your new column: you can exclude certain words, for example, or limit search results to show only tweets that have been retweeted or favourited a certain number of times. The obvious approach for businesses is to have a search column for your company name. That way, if a user “subtweets” you - that is, uses your company name rather than your username - you’ll see their tweet anyway.
TweetDeck also allows you to schedule tweets, so you can time your posts for when you think you’ll get the best results (more on this below). You can schedule as many tweets for the future as you like, and they appear queued in the Scheduled column, so you can keep an eye out for typos or information that becomes out-of-date. Scheduled tweets are stored server-side, so TweetDeck doesn’t need to be running at the time your tweets are scheduled.
If you want multiple members of your team to be able to tweet, you can do this from here too: click Accounts | Team, and you can enter the username of those you want to have access to your Twitter account. Two levels of access are offered: admins and contributors. Both can write new tweets, and follow and unfollow other accounts; admins are also able to add new members to the team and remove old ones. No one can change your Twitter login credentials, and access can be revoked at your discretion, protecting you from rogue employees, and from having to change your Twitter password every time you want to remove someone.
For larger organisations, rival client Hootsuite (hootsuite.com) offers significantly more power, although with a steeper learning curve. If you have a number of messages to schedule, for example, Hootsuite allows you to import your tweets as a CSV file; the first column stores the date and time your tweet should be broadcast; the second the tweet itself; and the third any links you wish to append.
Hootsuite also gives you the ability to run a team with differing levels of access to an account, although for this you’ll need a Pro account, which costs around £7 per month. It works by setting up an “Organisation” to which other members can be added; in this way, your Twitter account details don’t need to be dished out, and permission to access accounts can be assigned and revoked as people join and leave your company.
With Hootsuite’s Enterprise subscription (price on application), you can do even more: tweet approval, for example, allows you to sign off on tweets before they’re published, so you can stop the office intern accidentally tweeting from the company account on a Friday night.
Understand your audience
The basic principles of how to tweet are universal: keep your messages conversational, react to people who get in touch with you, and avoid repetitive sales messages. What’s more difficult is finding the right balance for your particular business. For example, received wisdom tells us that 9am, midday and mid afternoon are good times to tweet, but if you’re trying to reach a market of students or travellers, mid morning and early evening may work better.
Although Hootsuite includes analytics tools, at a cost of $1 (about 65p) per month, you’ll probably want to first make use of free third-party services to help you understand how, when and why your followers react. One way to gauge engagement is to create a free account with bit.ly and use it to shorten every link you post. You can then check your bit.ly account to see how many clicks each link attracts. For TweetDeck users this is easy, as you can opt to use bit.ly as your default URL shortener.
SocialBro (socialbro.com) also offers analytics tools for free. You can define your follower base by gender, location, language and more. You can also view a breakdown of your Twitter “community”, revealing which of your followers has the biggest following - and therefore highlighting the followers with whom you should build relationships.
SocialBro can help you with timing your tweets too: its “Best time to tw'eet” reports illustrate when your followers are most likely to be online, in particular when influential followers are online. Tag clouds can show you the kinds of subjects your followers are tweeting about to offer guidance on what to write.
With plenty of automation on offer, it may be tempting to queue up a few weeks’ of tweets, but to get the most from Twitter, a combination of scheduled and impromptu tweets works best. If your followers feel your feed is being run by a PC, they won’t be motivated to tweet back or retweet. A small, engaged audience is better for business than a large dormant one.