Corporate vs personal tweeting - a world of difference
Posted by Anna Knapik on March 31, 2010 in Branding, Marketing, Online, Social Media with 1 CommentThe world of marketing has changed dramatically and social media seems to be no longer an alternative but a must. As a result, a lot of marketing/PR/social media people juggle several social media accounts on a daily basis – for their companies, clients, and finally for themselves.
While I've been tweeting for my company for over a year now, I only recently joined the twitter community on a personal front. I'm managing both accounts now and I must say there's a world of difference. There is a wealth of twitter clients to choose from which make this process quite easy on the technical front. Nevertheless, there are a number of things that differentiate corporate and personal tweeting, which we probably do not consider until we start doing both.
Content
Content is probably the most difficult thing to decide on when establishing a twitter presence. There's a lot of talk online about 'meaningful content', but no content can be truly meaningful until it's relevant to your target audience. Have you ever wondered why twitter changed its initial intro question from 'What are you doing' to 'What's happening'? People are curious by nature, which doesn't mean they want to hear only about yourself and your daily doings - which refers both to corporate and personal tweeting.
While personal accounts may contain a certain amount of personal and often random information, corporate tweets are expected to provide not only news and information about the company but also useful links and industry news - all of this can help position the company as an industry expert. A sanity check is necessary to make sure all the content we post is relevant to our followers and conveys the right message about our company. Twitter is yet another medium of communicating your message, but due to its easy access (people don't have to be your followers to see what you are tweeting about unless you protect your tweets) and fast responsiveness, it can quickly turn from a brand advocate to your enemy.
This usually isn't the case with personal accounts where you create your own microblog and can post freely your personal opinions and thoughts. Having said that, I'm not oblivious to the fact that there have been numerous examples where careless tweeting resulted in some big personal disasters like getting fired or a broken relationship. That's why you might want to ask yourself a question - is it good for my personal brand, is it what I want people to know? But that's about it - when tweeting as an individual you are not responsible for a company's reputation and any bad PR that improper content might cause.
Tone
If you tweet on a personal front - it's easy to set the tone. Great personal accounts in the twitter community manage to combine useful information in their area of interest (see above: CONTENT) with a balanced personal attitude toward a subject, which makes them stand out from the twitter crowd.
In corporate tweeting that's a hard thing to achieve, as there's a very fine line between being overly formal and corporate and becoming cheesy and corny. Still, in order to properly 'connect' with target audiences, companies need to speak their language and the tone needs to reflect it. Nobody wants to follow a brand that is sombre and impersonal. But again, a little bit too much of the laid-back talk and we run the risk of being seen as frivolous and unprofessional. That's why, it's so important for brands to convey a consistent tone in everything they post, since the way we broadcast information and engage can hugely influence the perception of our brand.
Time
Social media, and Twitter in particular, can be quite merciless when it comes to time - it's all about short, real-time communication, which can in many cases become irrelevant shortly after posting. While personal tweets can be sent whenever we feel like, be re-tweeted or not, can be responded to or remain unresponded, time is one thing brands cannot afford to waste on twitter. As twitter is a fast-response social media platform, all queries about the product/service or questions about the brand or company have to be monitored and replied to in a timely manner, in a consistent TONE and with relevant information (CONTENT). And even more so in the event of a crisis - leaving a potentially dangerous issue without response may only escalate the problem, which can become a huge corporate crisis in no time.
Personality
There are many types of twitter accounts - from pure personal through to professional and corporate profiles, which is covered in detail here. The question is how can personality influence your success on twitter? Getting valuable followers for a company may prove difficult as there are enough people on twitter who just choose not to follow logo accounts. They prefer authenticity and human touch guaranteed by individual accounts. In this respect, it is way easier for individuals to break through in social media: get (maybe fewer but relevant) followers, make useful connections and communicate your message.
On the other hand, think about all those special offers, competitions, latest deals that companies advertise on twitter! Over 1.5 million of @DellOutlet followers do not miss the personal touch when they see all the discounts that Dell offers on twitter. From this point of view, it can even be in some ways easier to tweet for a brand despite a lack of face and personal approach. If the primary aim of social media strategy is to increase sales rather than put a face to your brand, then it's quite an easy task, especially if you have some good deals and put a little effort into selling them. It becomes a challenge when you need to accomplish several other tasks - like connecting with your target audience, educating them about your brand, becoming personal and approachable, engaging in a conversation. There are several consumer brands though which achieve these on a daily basis, just to name a few: Hertz, Starbucks, Southwest Airlines. In addition to special offers and promotions, they succeed at demonstrating genuine interest in their customers, responding to their queries in a timely manner, running a great dialog with their followers plus remaining 100% professional in all of this.
People
A big aspect of twitter engagement is people. After all, this is people that you connect, communicate and share with. We sometimes seem to forget that behind each twitter account there's a human and even in the case of brands it is people who run their twitter presence. We cannot ignore the human factor and instead of properly connecting and having a conversation, try to push our content, drive traffic to the websites and spam people with irrelevant DMs.
This is the great thing about personal accounts - you choose who you connect and engage with. You don't have to deal with absolute timewasters if you don't feel like it. You just connect with people who you have a genuine interest in. Corporate accounts don't have this freedom - after all, it's all about engagement and interaction. You have to deal with people and their (not always positive) comments about the brand/product whether you like it or not. So it comes back to the timely response (see above: TIME), quality of information posted (CONTENT), the way you engage (TONE) and how personal you want to get (PERSONALITY).
Anna Knapik is passionate about corporate communications and B2B marketing. She has a particular interest in the online arena and its application across various marketing disciplines.
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Thanks for the lesson Anna… really good.
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