Twitter 101 Chapter 4 THINGS YOU SHOULD TWEET

What Should You Tweet?

What you tweet is obviously very important. Your goal should always be the same – provide value in your tweets just as you would in your products. Because users on Twitter can follow or unfollow you at will, it is important to instill value in your tweets and given people a reason to follow you and keep following you. Though your goal remains constant you have several very different ways to accomplish it. Here are four distinct ways to use Twitter.

1.      Official Company News, Sales, and Special Offers

This method is by far the most simply straight forward way for a company to use Twitter; however, it’s not without pitfalls. This method of tweeting will succeed or fail depending on what type of news, sales, and offers you’re providing and whether or not people on Twitter like them. Dell uses this type of tweeting effectively for its outlet stores. (http://twitter.com/#!/DellOutlet) Dell posts various coupons and exclusive offers on Twitter that customers can redeem online or at an outlet store. In addition to building value by offering customers coupons you can news and product releases. For example, Microsoft tweeted about what it showed at the E3 video game conference (http://twitter.com/#!/MSFTnews). E3 is an event where video game companies unveil new games or technologies related to games. Microsoft tweeting about E3 is a good example of knowing what your customers are already interested in and meeting them there. Someone interested in Microsoft’s newest technologies is probably also interested in the releases at E3. Also, if you plan on using URLs in these tweets, which you should, make sure to shorten the URL. Shortening your URL makes it so that the URL doesn’t take up your entire tweet (remember you only have 140 characters), and it is also the standard on Twitter. Here are a couple popular URL shortening services: http://bit.ly/ and http://tinyurl.com/ and http://goo.gl/

2.      Customer Service and Damage Control

Another way to use Twitter is as a type of customer service hotline. Your customers are probably already on Twitter talking about your company, both positively and negatively, so monitor what they’re saying about you and try and help them if you can. At this point you might be wondering why you can’t offer your customers sales and news, as well as customer service. The answer is you can and probably should do both. But, especially if you’re an average or large company, you should create different Twitter accounts for each. Dell is a perfect example of this: DellOutlet offers deals, DellCares offers customer service. Creating separate accounts makes it so your customers know where to go to get the information that they need. As I’ve mentioned in previous blogs (http://bit.ly/mgczv0, this is an example of what a URL shortener will do.), do not ignore @replies. An @reply is when a user starts his tweet with @yourcompanyname. This is how people respond to specific users on Twitter.  You should read these tweets and reply to them if it is appropriate. Deal with response the same way you would at your customer service hotline. For an example of this read some of the tweets DellCares makes of Twitter. (http://twitter.com/#!/DellCares)

That’s it for today but stay tuned because we’ll be talking about other ways to use Twitter next.