by Lara Kulpa. Lara is the owner of Ginkgo Consulting, a web marketing and consulting firm. Follow her at @larakulpa.
Reader Question: My company recently started a Twitter account and we chose to have 3 “tweeters” in order to spread workload, include separate areas of expertise, and just give it variety. Do you think that a twitter account should always be (or at least look like) one person? Right now we describe each person in our bio. – Sean Robbins (@saucony)
As more and more businesses get into Twitter, this question is one that I’m sure many will struggle with. If the CEO of a company joins Twitter and decides to connect with people, that’s great. But the question is bound to come into a follower’s mind, “Is this really the CEO or is it someone acting on his/her behalf on Twitter?”
But what if your company has different types of products or services, geared toward different types of users? In that case, yes, I think it’s a good idea for multiple “company” twitter accounts. Let’s use the time-tested “widget company” for an example:
Widgetz is a company that manufactures, sells, and repairs widgets of many different kinds.
- CEO of Widgetz should have a Twitter account to initially put a “face to the name”.
- The VP of manufacturing should also have a Twitter account.
- As should the VP of Sales.
- And also the VP of Marketing/Advertising.
- And definitely, the VP of the Repairs department too.
All five of these people bring different experiences with widgets to the table. They interact with the product differently, their day-to-day dealings with customers, suppliers, and retailers are entirely different. Therefore, they should be interacting with people differently, regardless if it’s on Twitter or not.
In the case of @saucony, the people using the account are currently adding their names to the end of each tweet. With only 140 characters available, they’re using valuable real estate to say who it is that’s actually responding, upwards of 8 characters worth! Having separate accounts would alleviate this.
The bottom line is that not only should multiple employees of a company be using Twitter, but they should have their own Twitter accounts. The “streaming” nature of Twitter makes it extremely difficult to have multiple people logging into one account to track follower questions or participate in a flow of discussion, without the follower being confused or unsure of exactly who he or she is talking to.
Just make sure that you’re all together avoiding overly repetitive tweets (or too many RT’s) and make sure that you’re not using Twitter with each other when you should be using an IM service. Not that you can’t interact with each other on Twitter, but keep it to a reasonable level.
Bonus Tip: Develop a Twitter landing page on your site that all the Twitter accounts link to in their profiles. There, you can explain the accounts and who’s behind them, all on one page. That’ll give you more chances to get visits to your site, and you may wind up encouraging followers to follow all members of your team on Twitter!
@NateDesmond
I personally only follow people on Twitter, not companies. It will be interesting to see how Twitter users react to businesses on Twitter.
Thanks,
Nate
@kishizuka
Thanks so much for the post – helpful advice. Beside my personal account, I manage the Twitter presence of our publication School Library Journal (sljournal) and have struggled a bit with the issue of multiple Twitterers. Our audience — a wonderful mix of school/public librarians, K-12 educators, childrens’ authors/agents/publishers techies, and vendors — recognize when someone else has posted and have even Tweeted replies to this effect. So fascinating that a writer’s voice, style emerge even in 140-character segments. I’m thinking the landing page linking to staff who Twitter is the way to go. Thanks again.
@studentministry
We have this ‘problem’ also at my company, LifeWay Christian Resources. We have SO many product lines, services, and departments that one account cannot capture the variety our business offers. Our CEO, Thom Rainer is ‘real’ on Twitter. We have several other accounts, which I’ve listed on my personal blog – http://www.threeparts.com/official-lifeway-twitter-accounts. For accounts that aren’t self-descriptive, I added a line next the username so people can figure it out. Hopefully we’ll have a place for this on http://www.lifeway.com soon.
John and Kathy – Great ways to go about organizing your company’s Twitter presence the way you have! Keep up the great work.
Nate – Would you follow a person who was a rep for their business on Twitter, though? Most people tweet about their work and such, so is it different for you if it’s John Doe from Widgetz versus just John Doe? I’m curious…
great tips. i think its good to add variety and have a team working on twitter posts on behalf of a company. it makes the connection with a company and its customers so much stronger. everyone benefits.
@wpdude
Can I add something recarding routing information into your multiple company Twitter users. Have an aggregation account say widgetz which is monitoring the twitter stream for mentions of your products and services, the owner of this account could then be responsible to route the message into the correct department i.e. widgetz_customerservice and to inform the tweepl talking about yoru service that this twitter user will be in touch soon to discuss their concerns/ideas in more details
@studentministry
Surely, everyone here has seen htttp;//twitter.zappos.com. That’s what we’re aiming for a LifeWay rather than just a big list.
@hectorhenry17
Thank you for the pots. Good advice. one of the things that really worry me its how a normal user could manage several account? in my case i have 3 one is my and the other two are for my blogs and its really hard to menage all of them at the time.
Than you againg for the pots.
Can we log in for multiple accounts in one browser
@pierreloic
Great post Lara.
At the end of the day, I think it has to do with transparency with your audience. As long as the author of a specific post is identified and the post is relevant to the feed where it is published, there shouldn’t be any issue, very much like a blog with multiple editors.
Twitter doesn’t provide this functionality, so we had to build it
Listorbit – you can, but not all at the same time.
Pierre-Loic – Thanks for the feedback, and I agree that sometimes we have to invent our own ways to accomplish something on Twitter. I’d love to see some way to expand the profile though… I know that the whole “kitsch” of it all is “short short short” but wouldn’t it be nice if we could somehow show a link between company Twitter accounts, or something like that? *shrug*
@MolsonFerg
love this conversation…and so many opporutnities. I’m a big fan of transparency and “no spin” so I like the humanization approach behind a brand. Our team at Molson has tended to evolve on twitter as individuals at Molson…with various responsibilities and conversations in which we will engage. As we evolve with twitter it will be fascinating to see how brands will enter this space. There are lots of examples where brands are logos in the avatar and and individual speaks for the brand. There are also examples of teams behind a brand. At the end of the day I suppose its all about what the brand wants to represent and “be” on twitter. Better than that is how and why people will interact with that brand. Always worth trying…if no one is following its a pretty good indicator you missed the mark…if lots are following people must be intrigued…and the debate rolls on…cheers @MolsonFerg