I tend to assume that everyone around me knows all about Twitter
and seem to think that everyone engages in it and has an account. Therefore my jaw drops to the ground when I realise that quite a lot of people don’t get Twitter, and even more worrying, many companies don’t get it either.
You might say “well you’re being a bit of a snob here” but I don’t think so. Twitter is phenomenal. It was a slow start for me too, and I opened an account sniffed about, didn’t really get it or care, and then returned 2 months later. That time I actually made the effort to put the work in to get myself up and running.
I found people I wanted to follow and in turn many followed me back. Then I followed everyone who followed me, and realised that my entire stream was just noise. After that I became a lot more picky and in turn did not take it as a personal affront if someone did not follow me back. I choose to follow people because I value their Tweets.
I use it to learn about stuff and…to complain:
I recently complained that a particular flower delivery company website didn’t let me proceed to checkout which is lame coming from a large company especially. How many sales were they losing just before Mothers day? I Tweeted my disappointment and in response their competitors got in touch and offered me free delivery and a 10% discount – smart.
Twitter is important for you as a consumer, an individual, a business and as someone who wants to stay on top of breaking news. I urge those not involved yet to get started:
- Open an account
- Personalise your homepage
- Find Tweeters who interest you and follow them
- Contribute valuable Tweets (news, opinion, links…)
- Reply to people so you can converse
- Get TweetDeck
For businesses:
Find someone with experience in using Twitter to do reputation management, intelligent and subtle marketing, customer service and business contribution to the Twitter community (thus making your company part of the discussion.
The advantage of doing this is that you will be up and running quickly and won’t make any mistakes which will cost you dearly. You can do it yourself but you may find it a drain on resources unless you can train your staff to contribute positively.
If your company is not involved in not just Twitter but social media as a whole, you are missing a trick, and it could become create quite a gap between you and your competitors who are engaging.
For more information about Twitter, check out David Griner’s cool “Tao of Twitter” to get you started:
