Brands: Have You Answered These Questions Before Joining Twitter

Ask any social media consultant about great listening outposts on the web and they’ll tell you that Twitter is one of the places you MUST have a profile in. With so many users already addicted to the popular social media site and many more signing up every day, I don’t see how you can go wrong with Twitter.

But you have to remember that there’s more to it that just signing up for a profile. You’ll have to consider lots of things once you have your brand’s Twitter page set up. Here are some of them:

1. What’s your Twitter account going to be for? Will you use it as a channel for customer service, a news feed outlet, an announcement board? Your Twitter page should have a purpose, find what yours is supposed to be.

2. Who’s your target audience in Twitter. Your tweets are supposed to be focused on reaching a group or community that best relates to your brand. Also, knowing who you want to reach out to with your tweets make drafting your posts much easier.

3. Who’s going to be tweeting for you? If you want to maintain visibility in Twitter, you’re going to have to update on a regular basis. Once or twice a day should suffice. If you can’t do it, who will you appoint to do the job for you?

4. How will you respond to replies or mentions of you? Are you going to set up an auto responder or make a personal reply within 24 hours? Your followers would want to know that you acknowledge what they say about you, so think this through.

5. How do you intend to measure success? Are you going to base it on follow count, retweet count, or how many people you’ve converted from followers to customers? It varies with different brands, you’re going to have to assess what’s more important to you.

It takes more than just signing up to guarantee success in Twitter. It may seem like an easy thing to do, but tweeting for your brand takes more than just answering the question, “What’s happening?”