4 Tips to Create a Killer Company Twitter Account

[toc]So, you’ve decided it’s time for your business to join the modern age. What better way to do that than with a brand new company twitter account? Sure, the world of social media can be a little intimidating, but once you get started, you’ll discover huge opportunities in interactive research and social marketing. This brave new world does have its own rules, though, so read on to find a few good tips for starting your own company twitter account.

1. Sign up with Twitter

Okay, I know, it sounds obvious, but a lot of people just can’t believe that Twitter actually has legitimate business uses and isn’t just a way to catch up on your celebrity gossip. Well, check out some of these statistics. Twitter has over 500 million active users. That’s not just not users, period, but 500 million active ones, and out of those, nearly a quarter check their feed more than twice a day. Where else can you market to a group that big and that engaged for absolutely free?

I can hear your objections now. You’re thinking that Twitter users won’t be interested in looking at your company twitter account when they could be checking out Kanye West or their ex-girlfriend instead. That sort of thinking is understandable, but it’s becoming less true every day.

“Twitter is gradually taking on a second identity as a business prospecting tool. It’s uniquely good as a conversation starter with utter strangers who might one day become your customers, your business partners or your employees.” – George Anders, Forbes Magazine

Forbes noticed this trend over a year ago. While Twitter used to be just another social outlet, it’s quickly becoming a really useful way to connect with employees, other businesses, and potential customers. And the users really are interested. A full third of twitter users follow at least one corporate account, and 79 per cent of them consider themselves to be more likely to recommend a brand that they follow. By connecting with your company twitter account, users will feel like they have a personal interest in and relationship with your brand. Suddenly, buying from you feels just like an exchange with a neighbor.

2. Use a picture of the CEO as the photo profile.

People use twitter to get to know other people. Face it, nobody wants to talk to a logo; they want to interact with a real human and form an actual personal connection. Even if you make it clear that it’s a company twitter account, they still want to feel like they know you, and the best way to accomplish that is to use a picture of a real live person as your avatar. When tweets are coming straight from the CEO, people will be much more interested in what you have to say.

There are a couple rules to keep in mind when picking out the picture. First, keep it friendly. If your CEO’s corporate headshot is one of those serious-and-piercing deals, take a new one with a smile. Casual clothes aren’t a bad idea, either, especially if you’re in design or some other relatively trendy field. Make sure there is only one person in the picture, though. People want to connect with a person, not a committee. Second, make it sharp. Don’t just take a quick snapshot or trim an old family photo. Twitter avatars are teensy, so if your picture is at all blurry or dark, it might just look like a blob once you’ve got it uploaded. Finally, once you find a good one, stick with it. When people scroll through their feed, they identify their favorites by the picture next to the tweet, so don’t go confusing everyone by changing your picture all the time.

3. Have a stunning Twitter Background Image Profile

Twitter pages are fairly uniform, so to make your company twitter account stand out, it’s smart to customize the parts of the page that you can. The biggest one is your background image, so you’ll want to make yours a good one. The most important thing to remember is good use of space. Empty space is fine if you’re going for a sharp minimalist look, but be careful that nothing gets cut off. That can look quite sloppy. Be careful too that the design you pick will scale well to smaller screens and mobile devices. There’s no sense in having a background that looks great on a big monitor but becomes completely illegible on a tablet. Let’s look at some examples to see what works well.

https://twitter.com/Doubleolee – This background works well because it makes good use of space without cutting anything off. It’s helpful that the profile picture coordinates with the background image, so visitors to the profile get a nice cohesive feeling.

https://twitter.com/robingood – Again, look at the use of space here. A good idea to take from this one is the sidebar. On a company twitter account, a sidebar like that would make lots of room for links to company page, promotions, etc.

https://twitter.com/line25blog – This is a good example of a minimalist look. If it suits your business image, something sharp and sleek like this can be quite memorable. As a bonus, it can scale really easily to smaller devices.

As a quick sidenote, while there are a lot of free twitter backgrounds out there, you should probably go the extra mile and have someone custom make yours. First, Twitter gets a lot of updates, and many of those free backgrounds are made for earlier renditions and won’t fit anymore. Second, do you really want people seeing the same background on your company twitter account’s profile that they’ve seen on three others this week? Standing out is the goal, so make sure your background is unique.

4. Have a Description with a Unique Tone 

While links to your company website and information about the brand are important, your twitter description needs more than that: You need to have a personality. Even if the whole point of your company twitter account is marketing, nobody is going to follow some advertising android, so you need to make your personality enticing. That doesn’t necessarily mean you have to be funny (although it does help), but you do need to seem relatable and human.

It’s important to make sure the tone from your description comes through in all of your tweets as well, so it can be helpful to have just one person in charge of writing everything for the company twitter account. That way it’ll really seem like a unique entity, and other users won’t feel like they’re talking to somebody with multiple personalities.

You should also be aware of a few basic rules for twitter interaction. If you’re really goal-oriented, it can be tempting to use your twitter space to just market-market-market all the time, but it’s important that you really interact with other users. Respond to what other people say, comment on the news, post links and images (bonus: tweets with images have 200 per cent higher engagement, and people are 86 per cent more likely to retweet tweets with links in them). There’s no need to be long-winded. In fact, shorter tweets (under 100 characters) get slightly more engagement. You do need to post often, though, so that people don’t forget about you. Twice a day is ideal (often enough to be remembered but not so often people get annoyed at you spamming their feed), and you should line up some tweets for the weekend, too. There are several apps that can do that for you (see the link below), so you won’t have to worry about spending your day off on the company twitter account.

Okay, this is a lot to remember, but once you get started, it’s really very simple. Remember, twitter didn’t get to 500 million users by being hard to use. Once you follow these quick rules and get the hang of it, you’ll wonder why you didn’t sign up for a company twitter account years ago!

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Sources for images: FLICKR