Twitter is one of the most powerful micro-blogging sites on the internet that allows users to communicate via short 140 character status messages. It’s a very simple interface to use, free to set up and a great tool for businesses to share their ideas. I highly recommend for businesses to update their twitter regularly to stay engaged with their friends, potential consumers and industry colleagues. However, I feel the key to this is to do it in a conversational, unobtrusive way. In my observation of some of what I call “professional twitterers” I’ve found that they twitter like “professional twitterers.” I’m sure that you’ve got your hopes up too, to follow a key influencer that you may revere in your industry (mine is marketing, branding and public relations) only to find that they were just going to re-post links to industry articles all day – what a bummer! Here are a few ways that I feel you can use Twitter to keep clients, friends and industry colleagues engaged:
1. Don’t just re-post articles all day (a few are OK). Share a resourceful message (within the feed) that I can apply readily throughout my day + we don’t have time to do much off-line clicking. We all typically have our daily reading routine in the morning or at some seminole juncture we plan on throughout the day. If you have a sizable list of followers, especially other industry colleagues, in a matter of seconds your whole feed can be populated with “read my article updates.”
2. Don’t multiple retweet too much. My buddy @sherrymain put it best in her Twitter Style Guide Article, “Avoid multiple RTs (retweets). Simply RT the person you source. If someone is interested in seeing who the original source is, they can click on to the person you retweeted, or do a Twitter Search of the phrase or link. At some point, too many @usernames in a single tweet just becomes name-dropping.” I think she pretty much summed it up the only thing I’ll add is: “we don’t really know all of those people anyway…”
3. Don’t just make direct sales solicitations (a few are ok). We like you (obviously we are following you), but we are heavily inundated with sales messages everyday. Sometimes just leave a short message of humor, a non-offensive post in response to current news or something that is top of mind at the moment, for example: “Favre is back… Who thought he was staying in Mississippi all fall?”… Sharing in response to a current event humanizes you and let’s others know your not so just a menace in the office all day – lol. It also builds a sort of brand intimacy…
The beauty of Twitter is that it presents a great interface to gain insights and to share in trend topic dialogue. For those who represent a business, organization or particular profession we all need to be mindful of the purpose of the space and how to tweet in an organic way that can contribute to that purpose. Also, we can’t forget to have fun! It’s only 140 characters. You can shine light on your product or service, but at the same time, you can’t take it too seriously. Oh yea – be sure to follow me @mistermills…
For those that Tweet,
Jesse Mills
Brand Architect
M-Consulting
www.twitter.com/mistermills
Brand Strategy l Brand Design l Brand Development
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Yeah, i did like that my friend. That’s very sound guidance. I really enjoyed the knowledge and the post overall, keep it up Mills.
I will RT this to @jack. CEO of Twitter. Nice tips.
Jessie, thanks for the props! And very well put on both points one and three. It’s not hard to find the perfect balance in tweeting. But sometimes we need a reminder or two to make sure we’re not offending… and hopefully providing value.