The Twitter fail whale by Viying Lu

What has an unsuccessful whale got to do with your business? I’ll explain by the end of this post – all you need to know for now is that you definitely don’t want to be one. Easier said than done though because Twitter, like most social media sites, contains many pitfalls for an unsuspecting organisations to fall into. So to help you out here are our top five things NOT to do on Twitter.

1. Don’t start tweeting without a strategy

It’s surprisingly easy to damage your brand in just 140 characters. Start tweeting without having a plan about who in your business will be tweeting, to which people, and about what will make your company look amateur and confuse the image of your brand. One of the worst reasons you can start tweeting or is “because everyone else is doing it.”  So to help you avoid the temptation to getting going without a strategy, here are some ideas that may suit your business:

• Customer service – Twitter gives your business the opportunity to demonstrate how helpful you are, whether it’s openly and honestly dealing with a complaint, or responding to questions.  @WholeFoods do this very well.
• Build brand credibility – Share and link to interesting comments and thoughts that are relevant to your industry.  Post questions and encourage participation from your followers.
• Voucher codes – @Delloutlet has generated $3m in additional sales in the last two years by releasing exclusive voucher codes to their Twitter followers.

2. Don’t post news, PR….and nothing else

Yawn.  You have a news or press release section on your website for this, and it’s probably the least viewed section of your site.  There is a reason for that. Twitter belongs in the family of social media, of conversations and interacting with people.  It is not solely about pushing the message of how wonderful you are, no one will be listening and you’ll lose followers very quickly.  It’s OK to post the odd bit of news and self-promotion in between all the useful stuff, whether that’s tutorials, fun competitions and interesting links like @Mailchimp who get the balance of self-promotion just right.

3. Don’t just autotweet

Because at best, you’ll look like you don’t care. At worst you will make your business look like a spambot (that’s a robot that spams people). Very, very rarely autoresponders can work. I recommend any business tempted by automating anything on Twitter to read Econsultancy’s Twitter DM autoresponders: 15 tips and 40 + examples. Hint: because it frees up your time is not a good enough reason by itself.

4. Avoid the growing list of #tag FAILS

Hashtags are a way to tag your tweet with a particular trending topic so that they can be easily searched and found.  You create a hashtag simply by prefixing a word with a hash symbol e.g. #welovetheNHS Some businesses have harnessed the #tag to great effect.  The #moonfruit campaign was the most popular trending topic on Twitter during the 10 days it was live. However, here are two tales to act as a word of caution:

Starbucks: it’s all about timing

Starbucks created a marketing campaign which seemed to have everything going for it – a major national offline-online operation involving six major US cities each with their dedicated #tag.  Unfortunately, the campaign went live at exactly the same time an anti-Starbucks documentary aired on YouTube, meaning all the negative buzz surround Starbucks had a new platform to be heard.  Oops.

Habitat: an opportunity too good to miss?

Looking opportunistic and in bad taste is definitely not something a brand aims for.  However, when Habitat piggybacked on the massive amount on attention the Iranian protests received in June this year by using #Iran and #Mousavi in their promotional tweets, the company received an enormous backlash. Habitat is a household brand and should have known better.  This is really a cautionary tale that shows the importance of having internal guidelines on how an employee (or an intern in Habitat’s case… allegedly) should use Twitter, and ensuring your company has a plan of action if something does go wrong.

5. Don’t forget to listen

Twitter is conversation, not broadcast. Imagine how frustrating it is having a conversation with someone who won’t listen when you speak. Do not let your business become that person. Ways you can practise listening include:

• Re-tweet anything you find interesting (prefix your tweet with ‘RT’ and the Twitter user’s @name).
• Keep an eye out for mentions of your brand by using Twitter’s search facility.  Where appropriate answer questions and thank users if you receive praise.
• Post questions in-between everything else you tweet about.  Be sure to answer any replies you receive.

And the fail whale? It’s a much-loved Twitter error message, appearing during the service’s frequent crashes as it struggled with its growing popularity in the early days. You still don’t want to be one.

Have you seen any examples of Twitter use you’d like to share?