Distribution: Should You Twitter?
I often get asked by folks inside (and outside) our building if they should get a personal twitter account or if their company should be doing more on this site. The audience appears smaller than the traditional media site, and the work to update is like a blog in that it requires attention… sometimes a lot of attention.
The question to me is more, “Why would you not?”
Companies like Zappos and Wachovia have twitter accounts (@zappos, @wachovia) and look at them as marketing. That’s how I see them, too — if you have 300 people following you as a company, those are 300 passionate users about your brand.
If you do not listen to them in the ways that are convenient to them, they’ll look for info about your company or the content you provide elsewhere. Can you afford to not listen to or potentially lose passionate customers, especially technically savvy ones?
Local example: The Charlotte Observer had our @theobserver account before I got here, but the account feed broke and I asked the current admin to give access to interactive. He did so, and he remains interested in what we’re doing.
In the process of that transition and resetting up our standard feeds for the main account and for @thatsracin, we’ve learned from our audience we’re not giving them an additional layer they’d like; specifically, many want new Observer accounts broken off into distinct feeds, such as business. So now, that’s on our list(s) to do. We want to keep these passionate users reading our content. As I love to quote our editor Rick Thames, “We want you to read us” (the implication being in many places).
These customers have also sparked more newsroom interest than before, so our interactive team created a simple script so multiple people could post to an account we’re setting up with more editorial than feeds.
Simple enough to do, and it furthers our good connections with the community.
Why wouldn’t you do the same, even if in just a way to listen?