Just in case you don’t know, Twitter is a social communication tool, which people use to broadcast short messages.
These messages, called ‘tweets,’ are limited to 140 characters in length and can be sent directly from your own account on www.twitter.com. It’s possible to include links to web pages, images, and other media in a tweet.
Why would you want to do that? Well, as a Twitter user, you select which other people you wish to ‘follow’. When you follow someone, their tweets show up in a list known as your Twitter stream. Anyone who chooses to follow you will see your tweets in their stream.
It is not necessary to follow everyone who follows you and not everyone you choose to follow will follow you back.
It’s fast and furious and is used extensively by the media (and the public) for accessing all kinds of information really quickly. But it’s not just for journalists and Stephen Fry. Twitter can be great as a general communications channel, for employee and customer service messages and much more besides.
A word of caution though. If you don’t have anyone in-house who is social-media savvy – and by this I mean in a professional marketing capacity rather than somebody who just uses it socially – you would be well-advised at this stage to seek some expert advice to help you set things up properly and to help you achieve your objectives.
Aims and objectives
As social media use is still relatively new in the business world, it might be hard to even define what your objectives are as you don’t really know what it is capable of. So spending a little bit of time and money on external consultancy or some initial training or mentoring might be a very good idea.
But as with any new activity, it is good to define some goals and be able to demonstrate a return on investment over a period of time. So according to what you are trying to achieve, whether it be to have a simple communications channel or a multi-account, multi-user campaign at your disposal, it’s always good to know what it is that you’re aiming for.
Do your research before you start and look at what other organisations are doing. There is a host of free information online – remember Google is your friend and will turn up all manner of useful things. This site is an example of a great free resource that could help you formulate some initial ideas.
You will need to decide how many accounts you want to start up and to what end and then register the names. Do a short biography explaining what the account is for – you may also want to say who is doing your tweeting (although you don’t have to.)
If your tweets are aimed at boosting your employer brand, it is important is that you have a small team of people responsible for managing the accounts and sending them out. You might also like to ensure that the account is observed, if not 24/7, then longer than normal office opening hours.
And always have an answer to this question: Next time, what are you going to talk about?
Helen Moore is co-founder of specialist digital agency, The Media Marketing Co.
One Response
Always have a strategy…
Thanks for the advice, much of it I now know but all of it would have been useful when I was starting out on social media. We work hard at a content strategy and from that content we build in social media platforms – everything you mention here should help anyone starting out.
For us the key message was that this isn’t the answer, it’s part of the answer and is beocming more and more important everyday. I think HR as an industry should be tuning into training management software and, within that, tools like social media. Using it as a profile building tool and a communication tool. Create a community within your organisation and build the employer brand.
Interesting stuff, thanks!
Dave