Twitter strategy, tools and measures

10 tips for a business Twitter strategy

1. Listen first. Don’t jump straight in without a strategy - understand conversations in your marketplace about your brand, competing brands and customer concerns. If there aren’t conversations may be a Facebook strategy or blogging strategy may be more appropriate.
2. Integrate with other channels. For service resolve issues promptly via Email or phone. For sales offer coupons to redeem in-store if relevant.
3. Figure out who does the twittering. Don’t outsource this to a PR company - keep it genuine.
4. Reveal the person behind the company. Be human - give a face to the brand. Or faces… tips are given on managing multiple staff Twitterers.
5. Be conversational. Make your Tweets two-way - ask questions, reply to others through @messages.
6. RT Your customers.
7. Post mostly NOT about your company. The best and probably most tricky advice.
8. Link creatively to your sites. i.e. link in a lively way.
9. Report problems…and resolutions. Makes sense.
10. Offer solid customer support. There are some great examples of responsive support @comcastcares in the US and @carphonewarehouse in the UK.

See how other businesses use Twitter

Twitter tools

• Tweetbeep - Like Google Alerts for Twitter - alerts you with email digest when your brands are mentioned. Good idea, but looks like it might have infrastructure problems to me.
• Backtweets - again great in theory - give it your plain URL and it finds all backlinks to it regardless of URL shortener. Doesn’t work 100%
• Microplaza - Nice summary of top Tweets with potentially useful feature to filter by your interests - unfortunately gave me a 500 Internal Error for that option
• TwitterSheep - Enter your twitter username to see a tag cloud from the ‘bios’ of your twitter followers.

Review and evaluation

• How many Twitter users are listing you compared to similar organisations/brands = indication that your tweets are valuable
• Ratio of listing to follower = quality or value of your tweets to subscribers (example ratios Dave Chaffey 1.7%, Econsultancy 1.6%, Scobleizer 2.7%)
• Way categorised = your positioning
• How popular different lists are with other Twitter users