Geeking For Good

First and foremost, Twitter is not a marketing channel. It’s for conversation. People may have conversations about a brand, but it’s clearly another thing to talk to a brand. Some may not agree with me on this point, but your brand on Twitter needs a name or face attached to it, otherwise your communications seem a little disingenuous. Is it just one or many people twittering on behalf of your brand? Say so. I’d like to know whether I’m speaking to Jack in Marketing, Sally the volunteer or Mary the CEO. Identification provides context to your tweets. If you are going to inject some much-needed personality through your organisation’s Twitter account, do take the time to set some guidelines. For example, with the non-profit account I manage, I use the DM function for messages relating to birthdays or talking to people about personal triumphs or tragedies. This provides two benefits, in that you get to be human and genuinely connect to your followers, but keep the public stream open for the tweets more closely aligned to your organisational communications goals. Do you have followers that retweet your messages? Thank them, whether it’s a DM or public reply. If your followers tweet about something related to your organisation, retweet them. Another key way you can be human on Twitter is to take advantage of things like TV shows or segments broadcasted about your organisation or related topics. It’s a very simple way to engage with your followers in real-time. A great Australian example of this is the weekly TV show New Inventors on ABC. The hashtag #newinventors is used as a back-channel during the show, with great commentary from viewers and even the show talent Mark Pesce. You could provide commentary, new perspective on issues or even rebuttal of points raised in the show. Just by monitoring tweets containing keywords relating to the show, you can find new people to follow and engage with. They might never realise your organisation is on Twitter unless you take the time to interact with them. One thing I like to do with my organisation’s account is provide a look into the organisation by taking photos and upload them using TwitPic. Take pictures at events, meetings, or even of normal office activities. While these are my personal observations from running a non-profit Twitter account, I believe that for-profit brands could also benefit from injecting a little personality into their tweets as well.