The Twitter Book, 2nd Edition

Chapter 6. Twitter for Business: Special Considerations and Ideas

If you’re tweeting on behalf of your company, non-profit organization or in a primarily professional capacity, you’ve got a few additional challenges to make your Twitter account successful. In fact, everything we’ve said already applies to you. Here we discuss additional considerations and ideas to make your company’s or organization’s tweeting really sing.

Incidentally, if you’re interested in internal status updates for your organization—which a lot of companies find to be an inbox-freeing revelation—check out Yammer (http://yammer.com).

Listen first

The biggest mistake we see companies make when they first hit Twitter is to think about it as a channel to push out information. In fact, it turns out to be a great medium for holding conversations rather than for making announcements.

People already on Twitter will expect your corporate account(s) to engage with them, so before you start tweeting away, spend a few weeks or so understanding the ways people talk about you. Get a sense for the rhythms of conversation on Twitter, and think about how you’ll hold conversations.

No matter your sector, chances are that people are already tweeting about your products, your brand, your company or at least your industry. In Chapter 2, we cover a range of listening tools and techniques; later in this chapter, we address a few more. ...