Twitter business strategies – 10 tips from Tim O’Reilly

One of the most interesting aspects of digital marketing currently is watching and advising companies developing strategies for how Twitter can support their business.  I did a roundup in Feb 2009 on different approaches businesses are taking in their Twitter strategy.

So, I was pleased to receive a review copy of the Twitter book by @timoreilly who is best known for first defining the Web 2.0 concept and has over 600,000 followers (not bad for a business bod) and @SarahM who is a Twitter specialist who describes herself in her bio as  the 21st user of Twitter.

This post gives a brief review of the book and highlights, what for me, were the 10 most  useful practical tips for companies developing their Twitter business strategy. Since I like to be useful, I'll also summarise some of the tools I found useful in the book which I wasn't aware of.

10 Twitter business strategy tips

In Chapter 6, 25 business tips for Twitter are explained by the author. Here are the top 10 which resonated with me and my take on them.

1.  Listen first. Don't jump straight in without a strategy - understand conversations in your marketplace about your brand, competing brands and customer concerns. If there aren't conversations may be a Facebook strategy or blogging strategy may be more appropriate.

2. Integrate with other channels. For service resolve issues promptly via Email or phone. For sales offer coupons to redeem in-store if relevant.

3. Figure out who does the twittering. Don't outsource this to a PR company - keep it genuine.

4. Reveal the person behind the company. Be human - give a face to the brand. Or faces... tips are given on managing multiple staff Twitterers.

5. Be conversational.  Make your Tweets two-way - ask questions, reply to others through @messages.

6. RT Your customers.

7. Post mostly NOT about your company. The best and probably most tricky advice.

8. Link creatively to your sites.  i.e. link in a lively way.

9. Report problems...and resolutions. Makes sense.

10. Offer solid customer support. There are some great examples of responsive support @comcastcares in the US and @carphonewarehouse in the UK.

My Twitter style 140 character book review

Accessible Twitter-style, one-per-page guidelines with screengrab examples to help develop both personal and business strategies.

Tools to support business use of Twitter

There are many compilations of these, but these mostly reputation management tools from the book were new for me, so checked them out and this is what I found:

• Tweetbeep - Like Google Alerts for Twitter - alerts you with email digest when your brands are mentioned. Good idea, but looks like it might have infrastructure problems to me.
• Backtweets - again great in theory - give it your plain URL and it finds all backlinks to it regardless of URL shortener. Doesn't work 100% for me.
• Microplaza - Nice summary of top Tweets with potentially useful feature to filter by your interests - unfortunately gave me a 500 Internal Error for that option
• TwitterSheep - Enter your twitter username to see a tag cloud from the 'bios' of your twitter followers. FWIW Here's mine.