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What’s Twitter Etiquette for Brands?

Posted by Nick O'Neill on October 20th, 2008 10:24 AM

-Twitter Logo-Over the weekend, there was a lot of buzz about Britney Spears launching her own Twitter account. The initial discussion surrounded what this meant for Twitter, as it now appeared to be moving more mainstream. Britney’s presence on Twitter also coincides with the launch of her new song “Womanizer” (which I’ve embedded below).

The second discussion about Britney’s presence on Twitter was that it wasn’t personal. Gary Vaynerchuk highlighted this in a pretty entertaining video. As many people noticed, the tweets being posted to Britney’s accounts were being run by her team and not by Britney. At least Britney’s team acknowledged Gary’s request to be more personal earlier this morning.

The Varying Twitter Accounts

People use Twitter for different purposes. The most obvious is for expressing personal thoughts and then communicating with others. Some users (like myself), mix personal and promotional purposes with Twitter. I for instance post my blog posts and then post personal thoughts and write about the activities that I’m up to.

Comcast, which is probably the best brand example on Twitter, has Frank Eliason who manages the Comcast cares account. Frank monitors all instances of people tweeting about Comcast and gets directly in touch with them. A small group of accounts are actively managed by other people. For instance Barack Obama does not personally update his Twitter account.

Instead, Obama has a team which regularly updates Twitter with Obama’s activities. That doesn’t stop Obama from being the largest user by a huge margin. Barack Obama has over 100,000 followers.

What is the Right Way to Use Twitter?

This all brings me back to my original question which is: what’s the best way for brands to leverage Twitter? Gary Vaynerchuk believes that brands must provide a personal voice and a face if they are going to succeed. NPR News has one of the top 100 Twitter accounts though and they provide nothing personal, only news. There are 18 brands that function like NPR in the top 100 accounts.

The other 82 are all individuals. Does this mean that one should use Twitter as an individual then? I’m not quite sure to be honest. I think that based on the accounts I’ve looked at, you have to choose from the onset whether or not you want to be personal, or act as a brand. If your account is as a brand, don’t expect to have the same type of personal connection which helps small businesses grow.

Large brands can go off their brand name but small brands are forced to be more personal. What do you think is proper etiquette for brands? Do you prefer the personal route or the branded route? Is there anything in between?

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This entry was posted on Monday, October 20th, 2008 at 10:24 am and is filed under Analysis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Viewing 4 Comments

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    It's harder for a larger company to have a real personal voice on Twitter. I always thought of a Twitter account for a business to strictly used as more of a bulletin board for a company highlighting their activities and updates on current projects. Also to directly get in contact with users to have questions, another way of customer service. I don't think a company should get more personal than that.

    Craig
    www.budgetpulse.com
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    I tend to lean to the personal side. I do represent my company Twitter and I do like to give a more personal, friendly feel to my tweets. The size of the company does have a lot to do with the voice of the twitter feed. It is refreshing to see a large company with a strong twitter feed voice like Zappos, rather than just another marketing/news feed.
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    Working for big global companies supporting large scale systems, CSR (customer service relations) application's SLA (service level agreement) are real high especially on availability. Social tools like twitter extends any company's (regardless of size or location) ability to provide genuine customer service. I see Twitter as the front end of Customer Service w/o the automated VRU (voice response unit), or backend office support from India or other countries that you can't call back. Companies that succeed now a days are those that support their users - not fight them. The internet - web2.0 and other new social tools have arrived and are here to stay. The earlier they figure this out, the better they are. My opinion - the big challenge is not the tool but the customers - their language, culture, social politics, etc. and how companies can provide effective support to them 24/7 . Like it or not, Twitter is a utility like 911 that people used as seen advertised by the media during emergencies i.e. earthquakes, fire, etc. I don't see why this function cannot be incorporated in any company's CSR's production cycle.
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    I agree with Craig - I work at Microsoft on the MSDN team, and what we've done is started to use the /msdn account for broad announcements, status updates, and the like. (It doesn't have many followers because we're just getting started with this.) I monitor it, but not often. I use my personal account to build a follower network of people that I can interact with on the personal level.

    One other comment, though... I'm interested in how companies get behind (in terms of an SLA) the social-support channels versus their "official" support channels. I suppose Frank Eliason would be one of the best to ask.

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