Corporate Twittering: 6 Ways Companies Should Be Using Twitter

Twitter, the popular microblogging tool that I have posted about many times before, because it is one of my favorites, is becoming more and more mainstream.  As Twitter crosses into the mainstream, more companies are signing up with the hope of marketing and building customer communities.

Most companies are not maximizing their full Twitter potential. Here are my 6 ideas for companies to help them making sure they are getting the most out of their time investment in Twitter. (though the ideas here could be applied to social media in general this list is targeted at Twitter)

1. Learn About The People Following You – Every time a person follows you on twitter you can get an e-mail to let you know. This is where most companies on Twitter make their first mistake. Take this as an opportunity to reach out to that person and find out more about why they are following you. Eric from Auction Direct does a great job of this. He has developed a site to highlight people that take his new follower survey. With his site TweetandGreet.com he get lots of information from folks that relates back to his core business of selling cars.
   
2. Monitor What Twitter Users Are Saying About You – Twitter is growing fast, which offers many opportunities. Twitter though is only as valuable as the people you follow or from a companies perspective the people you listen to. Because of this, companies must monitor what is being said on Twitter. You can generate an RSS feed from search.twitter.com or you can use tools like TweetGrid and Monitter. Regardless of what you use, you should tack information not just about your company, but also competitors and industry issues.
3. Solve Customer Problems – In a recent survey 43% of Americans said that companies should use social media to solve their problems. We have all heard horror stories of bad customer service that turned into an online backlash against the company. The easiest way to stop this is to help solve customer problems and do so very quickly. Twitter is all about speed, which makes it a great platform to find customer problems as the occur. Comcast did this when a customer service manager created the Comcast Cares Twitter account with the purpose of help customers with problems.

   

4. Make Your  Community Feel Special – You Twitter community may only represent a very small percent of your customer base, but they are an extremely important group. Your Twitter community are engaged and care about your product/service and they are also active communicators allowing them to facilitate word-of-mouth about your product/service.  So start a program to make them feel special for example give your Twitter followers a discount or free shipping code.
5. Ask Questions – It is one thing to monitor what people are saying, but why not take it a step further. Ask questions of the people who are following your company. Ask them: What can we do better? What do you like least about our product? How could we improve our Web site to help you? You will get useful information and you will help to make your customers feel more invested in your brand.
6. Give Back To The Community – It doesn’t take much research to determine that many groups and individuals use the social web to help raise awareness or funding for social causes like disease research or disaster recovery. This can be an opportunity for a company to develop a relationship with its twitter community  by agreeing to match donations or even just helping to spread the word about an important cause.

Do you have other suggestions for companies using Twitter? Please leave them in the comments below.