Twitter 101: Tweeting for Fun and Profit

Everyone is talking about Twitter, and everyone wants to know how to handle a business Twitter account. As of recently, one in ten online adults in America are on Twitter. And trust me, if you spend just two weeks actually trying to tweet, you’ll be addicted too.

Some Background

Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that lets people “follow” your trail of 140 character posts, known as tweets. It started as a post-board where people would text in what they were doing from their cell phone. While the service launched three years ago, it has blossomed recently, with a 1,384% growth from February ’08 to February ’09. Currently, Twitter is the third largest social media service in the world, behind Facebook and MySpace.

How Can Twitter Help Your Business?

The service is not a solely business-free area though. Twitter has been used rather successfully by a plethora of businesses, some of the most notable being Jet Blue, Zappos, Southwest Airlines, Ford and Jack in the Box. The most prevalent uses of Twitter by businesses fall into one of two areas: customer support and brand building.

Using Twitter to Handle Customer Support

Customer support through Twitter is a more established, and more easily implementable, usage. Monitoring the mentions of your brand through sites such as search.twitter.com, has been used very successfully to deal with potential problems. One notable example is as follows:

If your Comcast cable service were to conk out, what’s the first thing you would do? Right: You’d complain about it on Twitter. In one case, customers in California began tweeting about a service outage two and a half hours before anyone bothered to dial the company’s customer support line. That’s why Comcast keeps a support rep Frank Eliason to monitor customer gripes on Twitter.

— Paul Boutin ‘Customer Support via Twitter? Salesforce.com Makes it Legit,’ The New York Times

Using Twitter in this way is a good way to react to negative sentiment about your brand, but is not the best way to build a positive view.

Using Twitter to Build and Personify Your Brand

On the flip side, using Twitter to help build your brand, when successfully executed, can do wonders for positive brand recognition. This is probably best epitomized by Zappos.com CEO Tony Hsieh.

Currently, Zappos has 351,550 followers (making them the second largest non-news corporate account). Now what does that statement mean? It means that several times a day (the average Twitter user tweets 8.2 times a day), the Zappos brand can touch over three hundred thousand people.

Hsieh doesn’t talk about promotions, or shoes, or his company in general (for the most part) though. He has never tried to sell anyone a new pair of kicks, and except for a few mentions of his office, you’d never know he had a real job.

Unlike many business Twitter accounts, Hsieh personifies his brand and turns it into a relatable entity. To the over 350,000 people who follow him, Zappos isn’t a faceless company selling shoes. It’s an entity that loses its Chapstick every two weeks to the “Chapstick Fairy.” And gets freaked out when it catches a mannequin in the corner of its eye. Zappos’ Twitter account has been able to do what so many companies have been striving for, and turned a brand into a person.

A Middle Ground

While these two ends of the spectrum do work in some cases, a middle ground is probably the best bet for most businesses. A prime example of this is Southwest Airlines. Southwest, which has almost 19,000 followers, does promote trips on their feed, but only sparingly. Most of the tweets are dedicated to passing on interesting tidbits and pictures from flights.

By maintaining an interesting and regular stream of tweets, Southwest Airlines has grown into one of the most successful examples of corporate Twitter use. It uses it’s account to combat negative press, promote new features (they’re installing WiFi on their planes now), and build the brand as a fun airline to fly.

What’s Next for Twitter?

Twitter is constantly expanding, and new uses for the microblog prop up every day. Some of these, like the examples mentioned above, are great, some of these are not. Just to liven up your day, I offer up the world’s worst screenplay. It was built solely through people direct messaging (think of a Twitter IM) lines to Southwest Airline’s Twitter account. It pushed the medium a step further, but lets just say it’s a start.

Currently the only people who don’t make money off of Twitter are the people who built it. They keep talking about doing everything from charging corporate users to allowing PPC style ads. As the amount of Tweeple continues to increase, who knows what tomorrow brings for the micro-blog…