Recently … we stumbled across a question in one of our linkedin groups, “Twitter Power for Business” posted by Tara Cain, a former newspaper journalist, communications specialist, currently working with global consumer giant Reckitt Benckiser.
“The consumer goods company Reckitt Benckiser wants graduates to be aware of the exciting career opportunities within the company. They have utilised Facebook, Linked In and run an employee blog – but can Twitter help with an awareness-raising initiative too? Should it be used for those purposes and will the right people be listening? “
Our response from EMG was posted by our President and CMO, Paul Evans:
“At the risk of waxing Gen Y …. Duh! Asking if brands should use Twitter is like asking if the pony express should have used … well, ponies! And technically speaking … Twitter is actually faster and not resplendent with options for joining groups, taking quizzes and becoming a fan of the cause Du Jour … Hence, more efficient. “
The fact that someone actually is still asking that is kind of funny to us … Granted, we didn’t adopt Twitter ourselves until about 21 days ago… We had dabbled in it, set up personal accounts, but made the decision as a company to migrate to a full-fledged professional tweeting team … So, when we did, just as all initiatives at Evans Media Group, we went all out. We maintain a professional reputation on twitter by tweeting on topics related to our market, our clients, and our industry and have successfully grown our followers to nearly 1,000 in 3 short weeks.
These followers, in addition to connections on other social media networks (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn) enabled us to claim our Facebook url for Evans Media Group in 12 hours. This quickly taught us the strength of social media as it relates to networking as well as building your brand.
If you are going to use Linkedin and Facebook, why wouldn’t you use Twitter as a company? That is like eating and drinking without breathing.
However, I would not recommend setting up a Twitter account, just for the sake of being able to check that off your list. There are daily activities that you should be engaging in on Twitter. You should be actively reading your followers tweets, following other people on Twitter, and most importantly, re-following those that have followed you as a professional courtesy. You should treat Twitter as the modernized version of email. It would not be considered good business etiquette to receive an email from a co-worker, vendor or client, and simply ignore them. In the same sense, you should not ignore your followers. Furthermore, if you are tweeting – do it right … The learning curve is not that steep … A few hashmarks here, an @ sign there – Read a few good tweets from some reputable tweeters, and you should be able to pick it up pretty quickly. If not, at least take the time to do the research. This is your company brand you are promoting … or trashing, if not done properly.
Now that Tweets show up in Bing search results, the professionalism, brand building, and opportunities are just exploding with the potential to make your company succeed, even on a global level. Twitter’s searching capabilities are somewhat limited, but even Google or Bing will not find your twitter page with a naming convention such as Edd_at_rb … And, if for some reason it did – would that tie to your company brand?
IMHO …
Written by: Sara Paxton, managing partner, CTO, and Social Media Officer of Evans Media Group, Kansas City’s Social Media Agency, a boutique agency located in Overland Park, KS that specializes in traditional marketing, social media marketing, online marketing, and public relations.