Twitter Etiquette for Business Users

In further proof that Twitter is gaining mainstream adoption, even bo-hunk professional athletes are taking to the platform, but with only moderate degrees of success: MediaPost recently lambasted the “macho, tough guy discourse” had by pro footballers around Chicago Bears quarterback Jay Cutler’s torn knee, while Sysomos observed outrage around Emerson Eton, a member of the U.S. junior hockey team, whose posted a tweet criticising the city of Buffalo.

Like pro athletes, businesses too are well advised to play nice on Twitter. But even businesses are a bit confused as to what this means. For example, this week Xero blogged a handful Twitter questions that echo the same concerns that businesses of all size have about Twitter.

What counts as good Twitter etiquette? Should I follow my competitors? Should I follow anyone who follows me? Can I tweet things that are unrelated to business? How do I use this thing?

We often wonder this ourselves with our own @SocialBrief Twitter account. After all, if there’s one topic on Twitter that is over-saturated, it’s “social media”.

Think like a customer

I decided to take a different perspective and think about the experience from the user’s point of view. I have a personal Twitter account (@monicashaw) that I use for such nonsense as food, dog walking, movies, lack of sleep and related minutia. I’m a foodie and follow a few businesses and brands I’m particularly fond of such as Bath Ales, Bacheldre Mill, Demuths Restaurant and 22 Mill Street. As a customer who these businesses naturally want to target, what do I like about their Twitter streams?

• They respond to my Tweets. This is big, and Bath Ales is great at this. Whenever Friday night rolls around and I mention, “it’s beer o’clock, time to kick off the weekend with a delicious @bathales Gem”, I almost always get a response.
• They are helpful. This morning I lamented to my followers about an over-abundance of Swede. 22 Mill Street wrote back with a recipe idea that I plan to put into practise this weekend.
• They post interesting things that aren’t always related to their business. For example, Bacheldre Mill, a flour producer in Wales, just posted a Tweet letting me know it’s St Dwynwens day, a Welsh holiday. It has nothing to do with flour but it’s a neat factoid that also happens to reflect their enthusiasm for their locale.
• They give behind the scenes peaks at how they run their business. For example, Demuths just posted pictures of their restaurant’s new paint job. I find these sneak peaks fascinating, and the visual keeps the place in front of my mind when I’m thinking about where to eat in Bath.

Knowing how I use Twitter as a customer provides better perspective about how to use Twitter as a business. But Twitter is more than just a way to reach customers; it’s also a way to interact and learn from people in your own industry.

Think like a business owner

Over at SocialBrief, we follow loads of software companies, tech nerds, consultants, PR agencies, and pundits who are into social media. Most of these people aren’t customers, but rather, people doing similar stuff as we are. Why do we think it’s important to follow people in your industry?

• It reflects a sense of trust and camaraderie in the competition. The whole nature of the word “competitor” brings to mind fierce notions of winners and losers. Consumers don’t think this way. They may buy soap from two companies because they like them both. And they may also be interested in other soap-related news not necessarily related to your brand. You can provide this by sharing tidbits from other industry leaders in your follower list.
• Your Twitter personality won’t (and shouldn’t) be the same as everyone else in your industry, but monitoring their techniques can give you lots of ideas on what does and doesn’t work.
• Marketing strategies are not all one in the same. You can see first hand what others are doing and how people are responding.
• Trending products, services and topics can emerge quite quickly via Twitter. You can see it happen in real time and get your competitive strategy started earlier.
• Other people in your industry want to know the same stuff that you do. You can pick up on other good people to follow and find news or market research you haven’t come across yet.

Twitter Rules We Follow

Keep business and personal accounts separate

Some of you may only want to use Twitter for business, and that’s okay. But if you find yourself catching the bug and wanting to post things about your personal life, it’s a good idea to keep a separate personal account. Also, if you’re trying to establish yourself as an individual leader in your field, a personal account is vital.

Follow people who follow you IF they’re not spammy

As a business, you’re interested in getting your name out there to as many people as possible, and so following someone back is often a courteous way to say “thanks” and hopefully keep them as a subscriber in the long haul. But there are exceptions - there’s loads of spam accounts on Twitter and no doubt you’ve all been followed by people with sexy looking pictures claiming to have great products that will make you lots of money. The most cringe-worthy accounts are “social media experts” who, as far as I can tell, only follow social media experts, of which there are thousands. I’m not sure how this is good for business - I personally think that a smaller number of high quality connections is much more valuable than a high number of lame-o Twitter bots. Trust me, if you follow them all you will eventually get sick of auto-tweets about Top 10 this or 5 Lessons from So-And-So. Twitter is supposed to be a fun way to meet and connect with other people - both customers and people in your industry. Your stream should be interesting enough that it encourages you to maintain and keep up with your account.

Follow people who you think are interesting

It may seem obvious, but many business owners wonder if it’s appropriate to follow competitors or people only tangentially related to your business. Remember, you’re trying to create a network of people who will be interested in your tweets as much as you are in theirs. If you think someone’s interesting, there’s a fair chance they’ll think you’re interesting, too. And it’s absolutely fine to follow competitors, and anyone in your industry for that matter. These people will give you a look at how other people in your industry are using Twitter to do similar things.

Thank the people who follow you

A simple “Thanks for the follow!” in an @ reply or direct message can go a long way.

Don’t spam new followers in direct messages

How often have you followed someone and received a direct message back saying “Thanks for the follow, come buy our stuff at http://…”? How often do you follow those links? In our opinion, if someone wants your stuff, they’ll find it - don’t force it on them. If you want to encourage people to visit your website, then make it easy for them:

Put a link to your website in your profile description

Your business is on Twitter to gain customers, right? So make sure they can find you by linking to your site.

Don’t use auto-tweets

I don’t know about you, but my eyes glaze over auto-tweets of new blog posts. Take a few seconds to write a real, personalized Tweet. Show your followers that there’s a face (not just a computer) behind your Twitter stream. It’s the personal touch that gets most people to click and start a conversation. After all, isn’t that what Twitter is all about?

Respond personally to anyone who mentions you

Use a tool like Tweet Deck to track searches and @ replies and write a personal response to each. A simple “glad you liked our soap” or “thanks for the retweet” or “sorry you were disappointed, can we fix this?” proves your commitment to customer service and Twitter solidarity. Simply, it shows you’re paying attention, and people love that. 

Remember: Inform, educate or entertain

It’s the golden rule of writing, and that goes for 140-character tweets, too. Write posts that do at least one of the above things and you’re guaranteed to keep your reader’s interests.

Twitter is more than a marketing tool - it’s a way to explore how all kinds of people, customers, friends and competitors, interact and share information. When you understand that, then you’re in a great position to use Twitter to get your own message out there.

Quora proves the value of social over search, especially for business

Last week we reported on the rising popularity of Quora, a Q&A site much like LinkedIn Answers. Quora has taken off in recent weeks after an article in TechCrunch mentioned they were using it to research stories.

Last week I decided to try using Quora to find opinion on “social media ROI” for an article I’m writing. There I found input from big wigs in the industry like David Armano, SVP of Edelman Digital, as well as from smaller-scale marketers and entrepreneurs like myself. Their input offered significantly more insight (in much shorter form) than Google, where a search for the same phrase presented me with an impossibly long list of articles and blog posts. Quora offered a succinct answer to my question, curated and filtered by people I trust.

Quora in itself is nothing new, but the implications of its popularity are hugely relevant to marketers, developers and entrepreneurs. You may have heard of the “semantic web”, a technology that was meant to make all online data accessible in everyday language. Imagine if you could search Google the way you ask friends for advice - “Where can I get a good pizza in London?” - and get a real, concise answer rather than thousands of opinions, blog posts and directory listings (btw, the answer is “Story Deli” in Shoreditch). The trouble is, semantic search technology isn’t very good. Real people are better.

“See, the semantic web was supposed to take data and transform it into the way humans speak. And you know who else does that? Humans.” - Navneet Alang, Techi

Quora’s popularity is a telling indication of the social web’s most powerful asset over search: to provide curated, filtered information from trusted sources. Search may still rock for getting bits of information like addresses and movie times, but it will likely never answer those tough question about pizza, life, running a business and all those other tricky subjects that keep us up at night. Quora’s not there yet, either, and who knows, it may just be a fad. But at the moment, now is a great time to take advantage of Quora while it’s picking up steam.

Quora for business

Quora’s popularity with social media geeks is a boon for businesses seeking advice. We’ve been seeing loads of people (including ourselves) using Quora for numerous business and marketing purposes:

• Market research. Quora is full of people in your industry talking about their wants and needs, and there are dedicated topics such as Small Businesses acting as hubs for marketing and business advice.
• Expertise and influence. Responding to questions is a great way to establish yourself as an expert on the subject. And you can also learn a lot by following other experts. A great place to start is this thread: “Who are the must-follow CEOs on Quora?”
• Competitor insights. Follow competitors and see what questions they’re following and responding to. Sounds cheeky, but knowing what your competitors care and think about can hint at what they’re planning for the future.
• High-quality answers. If you’ve got a business question, there are people in the know with answers. For example, the question “How has Foursquare Reached Local Businesses?” received many authoritative responses, including one from Tristan Walker, Foursquare’s Director of Business Development.

Are you on Quora? What do you think?

How To Set Social Media Marketing Goals That Don’t Make You Cringe

Does the phrase “goal setting” make you cringe? Us, too. And yet, last week, we told you to “get real” with your social media goals in 2011. Meanwhile, Stephanie and I have been thinking about our own goals for SocialBrief. Because the fact is - and we’ve all learned this the hard way - without goals, life just rambles along without going anywhere. And worst of all, without a target, there’s never an excuse to open a bottle of champagne to celebrate a job well done (and we’re all about opening bottles of champagne).

Still, we don’t want to bore everyone to tears with yet another internet article about setting SMART goals for your business. Here’s how we’ve approached our social media goals at SocialBrief.

1. Start with your business goals

Ultimately, the goal of social media marketing is to help you grow your business. So start there - why do you want to get involved with social media in the first place? What do you want to achieve? Think long term and short term. Here are few ideas:

• Increase awareness
• Improve your reputation
• Establish partnerships
• Improve customer retention
• Promote a product or service
• Improve customer service
• Generate sales leads

Your business goal should ultimately be about making money, saving money, or furthering your broader strategy. If it doesn’t do one of these, then start over and try again.

Now, write your goals down.

2. Set social media goals that align with your business goals

Your social media goals should be action-oriented, measurable and align directly with your business goals. For example:

• Publish one high-quality blog post per week for the next six months (improve your reputation)
• Increase customer engagement on Facebook by 200% over the next year (increase awareness)
• Triple my website referrals from Twitter by Q4 (generate sales leads)

We told you to think long term with your business goals, but that’s a little harder with social media - who knows if Twitter will still be the big thing in 2015? Still, you can set short term social media goals that align with your long term business goals. For example, a short-term blogging strategy can help you establish a readership that, in the long term, grows your ad revenue. The most important thing is that you set realistic goals that you are pretty sure you can handle and set yourself up for success.

Now, write your goals down.

3. Pick your measures, track your goals and keep the champagne handy

What’s a goal without knowing when you’ll succeed? You should be able to look at your social media goals and identify a way to mark that the goal was achieved. For example:

• Publish one blog post per week over the next six months - create a list of the weeks between now and six months from now and tick off the weeks as you go.
• Increase customer engagement on Facebook by 200% over the next year - count the number of customer likes and comments on Facebook over the next year on a weekly of monthly basis.
• Triple my website referrals from Twitter by Q4 - use Google analytics to track Twitter referrals to your website.

If your goals are business-focussed, action-oriented and measurable, you’ll be in a good position to know if and when you’ve achieved those goals. After all, there a few things sweeter than the warm fuzzy feeling of seeing your business grow (not to mention that bottle of bubbly).

In 2011, Get Real With Your Social Media Goals

As we enter into the new year, most of us have been bombarded by trends and predictions for 2011. Social and mobile are colliding in a techno-storm, while recent news of Facebook’s $500 billion valuation is a telling sign that Facebook is taking over the Internet.

Needless to say, social media will continue booming in 2011 - new products, apps, blogs, forums and social networks will emerge. Some will survive, many will not. If this is sounding at all like the dot-com bubble of the 1990’s, well, you’re right. And if you’re not careful, your social media plans could go bust just like so many startups of previous decades.

So how can you ride the social media boom?

First, you can learn from other people’s mistakes. Last November, eMarketer published a report looking at the mistakes made by U.S. marketers in social media. Among the reasons, the three that topped the list were:

• Not allocating proper time/resources
• Not having a strategy
• Not defining goals/objectives

If you’ve made these mistakes yourself, don’t feel bad - with so many options out there (Twitter, Facebook, blogs, etc), it’s easy to become overwhelmed, misguided and jaded.

To avoid falling into a social media pit of despair this year, here are a few ideas to keep you afloat:

• Start small. You don’t have to master Facebook, Twitter and blogging all at once. Pick one thing, learn about it, and focus on mastering it.
• Set clearly-defined goals for your social media plans. And make sure they’re realistic and measurable.
• Focus on quality. The rise of social media usage tied with the growing popularity of Kindles, iPhones and other mobile devices means that there will be huge demand for content this year. But with demand comes competition. Make sure the content you produce is good enough to steal the show.
• Allocate time for social media marketing. And like your goals, make sure you’re realistic about how much time you actually have to spend on this thing.
• Decide who’s accountable and train them up. If you run a business, make sure you know who’s job it is to be in charge of social media (be it customer service, marketing or some other department). If your business is YOU, then learn everything you can about whatever channel you decide to pursue.

Yes, we know we’re here to keep you aware of the trends so you can take advantage of what’s hot in social media. But don’t let information overload keep you from being productive. Set realistic goals, devise a strategy and stay focused. If you can succeed in one small area of social media marketing, then you’ll be better able to make a splash when you take things to the next level.

Recommended reading:

• Trends to Watch in 2011 - A refreshingly realistic look at what’s coming this year by Sean Carton at ClickZ.
• The Social Media Learning Curve in 2011 - A short and sweet piece from Sysomos on the importance of learning before you leap.
• How to Manage Social Media Goals and Expectations - A great primer on goal setting from Ben Parr at Mashable.