Twitter Etiquette for Businesses: How to Keep your Followers
Elisa Pequini | @lipequini
In this post, we started our little Social Media Etiquette for Business series with Facebook. Today we are going to talk about Twitter and how your company should manage its brand presence on this social network.
Here's what we think can be considered as "good manners" on this social network:
1. Be careful with hashtags
Hashtags can be tricky when you're a business. Yes, you can use them for many different reasons and you do want to use hashtags that will make you show up in Twitter search. But please, only use hashtags that are relevant to your tweet. Meaning that, if you're talking about, let's say, a new feature of your hotel, don't hashtag it with #trueblood just because that is what's trending at the moment. Your followers will catch on, trust us.
2. Respond to your followers
Twitter is a tool to keep the conversation going and open. It is a two way street. Which means you will hear a lot of compliments and a lot of criticism. Address both cases: say "thank you" to the first and "how can we make it better" to the latter. If you receive too many replies, try to at least address the complaints. Not responding is a PR disaster waiting to happen.
3. Talk about other things, not just yourself
Remember the Social Media Business Equation? Yes, we encourage you to talk about yourself...on 20% of your tweets. The other 80% should be interacting, entertaining and informing. Don't spam your followers. Please.
4. Tweets have only 140 characters. Stick to it.
Nothing is more annoying than half-complete tweets with links or breaking a thought into three different tweets. Good example: automatic Facebook posts on Twitter. Such as "The sky today is beautiful. We have seen more than....fb.me/FSG09sd." Some companies' tweets are all like this. If you are one of them, please, stop. If we are following you on twitter we would like complete sentences, thank you very much.
5. Exclamation points - the abuse
"If your tweet is not exciting, an exclamation point is not going to make it any better," says our Social Media Manager, Amelia Clark. If you are addicted to exclamation points, get help.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJbSSVmm1Cs[/youtube]
6. Don't ask for ReTweets
Good social media marketing comes spontaneously. If your tweets are good, people will RT it. No need to ask, it just makes you sound needy. Yes, we said it.
We don't promise you'll get praises for your good manners with these tips, but it will sure help to keep your followers happy.