This is the third time I’ve sat down to write this, going from thinking it didn’t make sense to have a separate profile for your business, to you should probably secure your brand’s profile, to a challenge to do something interesting on the Internet.
We’re posing more questions than answers. Can having an inactive (or seldom active) account look poorly on your company? Is it more important to secure your place? If you’re in the marketing space does it look odd not to? Larger companies seem to be an easier answer as it’s probably part of someone’s job. But small businesses like ours I find are represented by the people behind them. Is the purpose to inform, get attention, to entertain? So maybe the better questions is what would you do with it that people would be interested in?
Observations? Thoughts?
I think you should definitely get a twitter account for you business, at least to secure the name. For small biz I think that since the brand is usually the owner’s own personality, the company Twitter account isn’t required. Unless you can provide info like links and news for the specific field that the company is in.
I have read a few blogs about this, all agree – multiple accounts for multiple viewpoints/perspectives. The case was already made when Facebook created Business/Fan pages. As always – it’s about your audience & content. Business contacts want to provide/see business related material – personal contacts may be interested in your business, but only as it pertains/impacts to your personal life. (ie: If you can’t make it to my birthday party – ’cause you’re working late on an awesome project, that’s ok.). Conversely, if I’m a business contact I probably don’t care if your brothers sister-in-law had a bouncing baby boy – or want to see photos of your new tattoo. Personal is personal, business is mostly business – but,you can’t always choose your audience.
Great points guys, thanks. Different audiences different content makes sense. At first our business contacts were mostly personal as well, but that’s changing as time goes on. I kind of feel like there’ll always be that mix of personal and business, but again, some may be interested in the company and not so much what I cooked for dinner ;)
This may be my own li’l pet peeve, but I have to add that I judge companies (be they big or wee) if they don’t regularly update. I’m not saying everyone has to be a tweet-a-holic – just that if I stroll over to a site or an fb page or somesuchthang, and it hasn’t been maintained, I deduct points from my ambiguous and idiosyncratic personal ranking system – particularly if said company is involved in marketing or promotion or info distribution … and points matter! I’m not inclined to work with or recommend those that don’t seem to have their proverbial act together, and if I know you, points can be redeemed for valuable prizes – like cupcakes (and if it isn’t already obvious, I fall firmly into the “interested in what you cooked for dinner” category). ;-)
At one point I had an account for about 5 sites / business ventures I run and then I decided I wanted to merge them all to my personal account. Reason being we are in a transparent age with social media and I wanted to reflect that. Plus it was easier tweeting about everything through one account. Whether people want to follow or not is up to them. I think the type of business is an important factor too. Since I do all online businesses I figured transparency and personalization was the way to go.
A while ago, I was managing a bunch of twitter accounts for business as well as my personal one. I found that the best approach in the end was to drop the corporate ones and make whatever announcements we needed to via a single stakeholder’s twitter account within the org and RT where necessary. The reach is farther on mine and other employees twitter accounts than the single business ones, so it’s really more effective and more personal in spreading whichever news we want.
Initially, my twitter account was used personally but then I acquired more local business followers and have changed most of my tweets to business topics. I think it’s good to let prospective clients know a little about my personal life, but the transition is difficult.
Currently, if I tweet about a really cool database development, I get no replies. If I tweet about a really cool beer glass, I receive comments and retweets. It’s hard to know if business people are reading twitter for business information, or to kill time at work.
I’ll let you know how things progress.
Yeah, we’ve basically been taking the personal approach too, seems to work well so far. I think the same way, Deirdre, managing more than one account isn’t that easy. Though I also know I’ve lost a business connection follower or two probably because of that, and maybe I tweet too much sometimes. The different audience point is important too, of course the questions is will there be different content? It’s a good question though, that I don’t think people ask often enough, which seems to leave them asking “now what?” Thanks for the great responses :)
I think that for some businesses should have multiple accounts too – depending on the different audiences you have. If you may have different types of possible followers, with different types of interest, its valuable to split off different types of content.
One of our clients is a tourism board (OK, not the best small business example, but bear with me), and we’ve recommended that the keep one account for business members (research, stats, new developments, marketing opportunities), and another for visitors (what’s happening this weekend? What events are on?).
Different audiences have different interests… so don’t bore someone with info that doesn’t apply to them. So furthermore, in my opinion, don’t use the same twitter account for personal AND business.