Twitter: Handle with care

I wrote recently on my other blog about the merits and perils of digital signage companies using Twitter to promote themselves. Quite a few companies now have Twitter accounts, but there’s not all that many doing effective things with it.

A lot of accounts are pretty much orphaned – the sign of companies or more likely individuals at companies who decided to set up an account, did a few posts, and then pretty much forgot about it.

Some others are on there a lot, but the people doing the posts don’t always remember they are posting under the company banner. Popping up a tweet saying “the development team just handed the new version release over to QA  … on track for Q4 release” is great for customers and prospects to read. Putting up “Went to Nine Inch Nails show last night, seriously hung over this AM” is not so good. But it happens.

That’s the sort of thing you MIGHT do on your personal Twitter account, but it is NOT what the company wants out there. Up for debate are the tweets corporate accounts do that inject a little personality, like what music someone is listening to or the horrors of travel. A little of that is OK, but I have “unfollowed” some people who are clearly in love with themselves.

The other peril with Twitter, like any of this social stuff, is to essentially spam your followers with micro-posts about everything your read, see and think. You are sending the message that you’ve got nothing but time on your hands.  And from the perspective of some of your followers, particularly if they have things like Tweetdeck running, you’re getting to be a pain in the butt.

Much is being written about Twitter as it steadily grows its user base and evolves. Maybe it will be something else in a year that everyone is using, or maybe this is another Google and a business mainstay. Whatever the case, this sort of real-time communication and marketing is here to stay and we all need to learn how to work with it.

As I see stuff, I will pass it along. But there’s one thing you need to know. If you write for your company, start learning to write in 140 characters or less. That’s what a micro-post in Twitter gives you.

Also … David Weinfeld writes regularly on his Digital Signage Insights blog about the industry and he has a good piece up about social media and our sector.

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