Getting the most out of social media – Twitter
In my last post, I looked at ways to help update your Facebook strategy to better connect with your customers on social media.
Twitter poses a slightly different challenge in that the sheer volume of posts on an average user’s timeline can drown out your message. More than 10,000 tweets are posted every minute by Twitter’s c. 115m active users – and with the average Twitter user following 102 accounts, your Tweet’s ‘prime’ is probably within the first 20 minutes of posting.
Organizational Twitter feeds – particularly those operated on behalf of a journal or publisher – tend to be used mostly as a type of newsfeed to announce the publication of articles, books, journal issues or other bulletins. This means that if you post article or publication links regularly, important news can struggle to stand out in your and your followers’ timelines. With that in mind, some publishers have hit on a creative way of ensuring top stories catch their followers’ attention – linking to the same content at different times throughout the day or week with new descriptive Tweets. You can use tools such as Tweriod to find the best time of day to send your tweets, and schedule them in advance using a social media dashboard or a service like Buffer. Combining these with URL trackers such as Bit.ly will help you gauge responses to help pinpoint which messages and times of day work best for your followers.
Not only is Twitter a good place to start conversations with your customers or members; it’s also becoming the first place they’ll turn to if they have a query about your product, service, or brand – or a complaint.
Dealing with dissatisfied customers is a rite of passage in social media, and though it can be a bit of a minefield, handling a complaint well in a public forum such as Twitter can help increase your followers’ sentiment towards your brand.
It’s important to delineate between genuine complaints and those who just want to ‘troll’ your accounts, though – many top brands’ customer service teams engage with customers’ complaints first via a publicly-visible “@” response, asking for more details to be sent as a Direct Message (or DM) in order to resolve the issue. This shows that they are responsive to customer complaints without cluttering up public timelines with the ins and outs of resolutions.
Alongside Facebook, Twitter is an essential part of any organization’s social media strategy. If you’d like to know more about how TBI can help social media have a greater impact for your company, why not read our case studies, or ask about our staff training programmes?