A Twitter Tutorial Part 3: Tweet My Brand

by Erin Keaveney, Integrated Publicist
We’ve talked a lot this week about how celebrities, the media, and the average person benefit from being on Twitter. In case you missed it, here’s the 140-character-capped recap: celebs get more exposure, the media breaks news faster, and the average person gets a perfect host for their ever-shrinking attention span.

For these groups, Twitter’s appeal is pretty straightforward. The territory gets a little stickier when brands enter the mix and begin to ask: how can we effectively use this space to our advantage?

Over the past year in particular, many brands have gained attention by joining Twitter with varying degrees of voluntary participation and ultimate success. We’ve seen it utilized for brand building, implemented for everything from crisis communication to showcasing brand personality. Some brands have crashed and burned when entering the Twitter-sphere, garnering embarrassingly high levels of public backlash. If you need examples, just search the following brands using your digital info-sharing resource of choice: Motrin (Google it), Domino’s (YouTube it), and Skittles (for the easily offended, whatever you do, DON’T Twitter Search it).

If used correctly, Twitter can be the perfect medium for brands to monitor their reputation and efficiently communicate with their customer. So what can brands do to tweet-talk their way into a positive consumer perception? By following a few simple guidelines:

Be informed.
Before signing your brand up for Twitter, search the site to see how current users utilize the space. Doing some research will help you understand how to work the space to your brand’s advantage, and also feel comfortable using it. You can then decide what you want to accomplish by directly engaging your consumer in this forum, including attracting new consumers, sharing news and updates with brand loyalists, and showcasing your brand’s personality.

Be pragmatic.
Twitter is a fun community, but that doesn’t mean brands should throw caution to the wind when entering this space - having a general plan and how to execute it is crucial. Just as companies have hurt themselves by ignoring the opportunity to tweet, it can also be dangerous to enter into the open forum without thinking it through. Recognize that having a Twitter feed takes time, and you’ll need a combination of man- and brainpower to open and maintain an open conversation with your consumer. Consistent updates and interesting content are crucial to keeping consumers engaged, but also to maintaining control of the conversation. Brands need to own their space by figuring out how to involve consumers without letting them take over (again, see Skittles on what NOT to do).

Be yourself.
The brands who are the most successful on Twitter are the companies that are open, honest, and understand who their audience is. Zappos is a brand that does a great job on Twitter, as their CEO Tony Hsieh constantly updates their feed with a mix of giveaways, company news, personal updates, and random thoughts. Hsieh’s cleverly uses personal commentary to help his nearly half a million followers feel directly connected to him, and ultimately, his brand. Knowing what works for your brand and having a variety of content that plays to your audience will help your brand’s identity shine through.