There’s been a lot of recent debate about Twitter, Twitter has overtaken MySpace traffic, the Morgan Stanley intern’s “findings” that teens don’t like Twitter and even, Twitter can damage your memory.
Love it or loath it, Twitter’s astounding growth shows no sign of slowing at the moment (despite there being a lot of spam), which means it’s probably a media channel worth getting to grips with if you haven’t already.
Just like the blogging and social networking hype cycles before micro-blogging appeared on the scene, the lack of hard and fast methodology on how these things can benefit your business are likely to be trial and error while you sort truth from fiction.
If you’re an organsation wanting to learn more about Twitter, here’s some tips for dipping a toe in the water.
Getting Started
- , and products, even if you’re not ready to use them yet
- Twitter works best when personalised, find who within the organisation is interested and let them use their name and a personal photo/avatar to identify themselves. Great examples are (Ford), l, and t (who is well known and clearly identified as Web Editor Alex Goldstein)
- Don’t know your @ from a # or a DM? There are loads of How to Use Twitter guides online
- Make friends, that’s real friends, don’t be tempted to use a service which will bulk follow 1000s of followees automatically and grow daily. This behaviour may make you look spammy to real users. Take your pick from a range of tools to help you find people
- Finding time to manage your Twitter at work can be a stumbling block. Using a twitter client like TweetDeck, Twhirl and the new HootSuite will make life more manageable once you’ve mastered the basics
Is it working?
When it’s time to report back to the organisation on how it’s going what exactly can you show? Moving away from the Social Media Measurement issue as a whole, there are some nifty little tools out there which will give you some facts and stats for your company number cruncher.
- Twitalyzer: Check your influence, Clout and ‘Signal to Noise’ ration in comparison to your community
- Bit.ly: URL shortening sites like this one open to use, but if you register an account you can see how many people are clicking the links you share and other data like what country they live in
- TwitterSheep: Are you attracting the right kind of followers? Twitter Sheep shows you your flock
- Topify: Creates a weekly digest of who said what to or about you
HootSuite, mentioned above, also offers a host of stats alongside helping you manage your tweets.
Image:
Tempero on Google+
