Twitter for Business: Does Consistency Count?

What makes for a good business Twitter account? Does it have to be all business all the time, or should it be a combination of business and personal messages in order to build personal relationships with followers?

Shannon Paul seems to believe that the best use of Twitter for business is to keep the business talk at less than half of posts:

Don’t be that guy:

Here are 5 things that guy does to inspire hatred and annoyance in social media circles:
1. Set up a Twitter account and tweet about your product/blog/website/agenda more than 50 percent of the time.

Personally, I think this is far from a rule, and dead wrong in many cases.

If I follow a business on Twitter, I want to hear about business communications only. If a business account only Twitters about business related issues less than 50% of the time, the majority of content they're putting out is worthless to me.

The person behind the business Twitter account may be the most interesting person in the world. I may have a lot in common with that person and love to hear about it. But I don't want to hear about it through a Twitter account set up for business use.

Sure, a combination of business and non-business related tweets on the same account can build a large and loyal following. However, I have a hunch that it's not the best following you could build. You'll probably end up losing busy business people would love to hear about your business but don't care to put up with the noise. Do you really want to lose those people? If a CEO looks through your business' last 20 tweets, will they have a clue what you do?

Shannon Paul's take on Twitter is interesting to me. She obviously uses Twitter much differently than her blog where she writes great content, consistently, on one topic: PR. People subscribe to her business blog because they know what to expect. It's not about her pets, what she had for dinner last night, or vacations more than 50% of the time with an occasional PR post thrown in. It's about PR.

This isn't to suggest that business people with personalities should stop sharing things about their personal lives on Twitter. Absolutely not. I'm just suggesting that there may be some benefits to having different Twitter accounts depending on which hat you're wearing at the time.

Generally I agree with Ed's theory. My tweets are largely personal, with some work stuff mixed in. I suspect subscribers come to me for me, perhaps partially because I'm a reporter for WCCO-TV, but it's not a "business" account. We have a breaking news twitter account that doesn't ever use the reply feature, however it does communicate two-ways using direct messages.

The content of the tweets is what really matters. Consistent tweets is not important to me (like consistent blogging is). Tweet when you have something big, if you're a business, or something really interesting.

Jason, as a TV reporter, you do kind of ride the fence. I get the impression that your followers generally know you of know of you and find you - the person - interesting, along with your local celebrity. However, there is definitely a cross-over benefit to that where people will pitch you stories, complain about stories, etc. since you're open about your work.

I think bringing work, occasionally, into a personal Twitter account, is likely easier than bringing personal stuff into a work account. I'm definitely interested in examples that support that theory or exceptions.

It was great to finally chat with you in person, Ed. I hope I didn't splash you with coffee while waving my metal mug around, but I tend to get excited when talking about my upcoming book, Twitter Means Business. A certain @DeRushaJ figures prominently in the tome, as does my pal @jongordon. The dudes are my media-industry case studies.

I personally think this is a flaw in the current Twitter model. I believe many people (who give Twitter only one shot) come to Twitter and leave with a "I just don't get it" attitude.

It is only one part of the problem (Twitter should offer case studies or examples of different ways to use Twitter (because it is different to different people).

At the least, Twitter should offer a way for people to tag a post as "biz or personal". The only way I get around this (even remotely) now is by having multiple Twitter accounts

Andy, I help people "get" Twitter by taking their phone, setting up an account for them, then following a handful of sane, interesting, Twitter users who are either in the same line of work as the person I'm helping, or funny. This seems to do the trick.

Using different accounts for different purposes works great. And applications are getting better at making this easier. Or, login to different accounts using different browsers.

Ed, thank you first of all for saying that I write great content. That really means a lot to me. But, please note that my blog is not a business blog. Even though I write about PR, it is very much a personal labor of love for me that I do outside the responsibilities of my day job.

You bring up an interesting point that I don't think I necessarily intended to make. When I said that 50 percent of a person's posts on Twitter should not be directed in the cause of promoting their business/blog/agenda/website, I didn't mean to stipulate that the other 50 percent of the person's tweets be totally irrelevant to their business.

I think it's possible for individuals to use Twitter for business while being personable, conversational, and human, while promoting other peoples' interesting content in a way that is not a direct call to action to purchase their product or visit their blog/website.

For instance, if an individual has a business that develops mobile software applications, they probably read other online publications and blogs considered relevant to their business and/or industry.

I think it's possible to share information and promote other sites' relevant, business-related content that is valuable to your network and supports other peoples' endeavors. However, listening to someone's incessant one-way call-to-action and kudos given only to themselves and/or paying customers is a huge turn-off in social networks and typically won't win friends OR new customers.

While I use Twitter differently than I use my blog, I don't necessarily think everyone needs to use Twitter in the same manner as me. However, the point I intended to make with the "Don't be that guy" post that you reference was to say that I do think that an endless stream of self-promotion is tiresome, intrusive and ineffective in social networks.

Shannon, thanks for clarifying. I think we'd find common ground somewhere in the middle. For example, someone can be consistently business professional without ever pitching their products or services directly.

Exactly! I think there's a lot of common ground here and that it's really up to the individual to decide what will work best for them as they integrate social networking into their lives.

I've just had a fair number of experiences with people who use social networks too aggressively and thought it was time to put a post out there to really clarify what a lot of people were already whispering.

Thanks so much for the post and for pointing out something I hadn't previously considered.

Comments

1. Posted by: PXLated on August 23, 2008 1:11 PM:

Have to agree, business account and personal, keep separate.
-------
Another option, set up a laconica server for the business like Leo Laporte just did for his TWiT Army... http://twit.tv/floss37

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