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FacebookDoes Twitter Fit into Your Branding Strategy?
December 1st, 2008 | Posted in Technical Writing 17 Comments »
Twitter, often referred to as the water cooler of the Internet, teaches us the art of brevity by limiting communication to 140 characters or less. But unless you can compress instructional content in ingenious ways, you’ll find Twitter limiting as a method for delivering documentation. Instead, Twitter is better used for the following:
- Eavesdropping on customer conversations
- Putting a personal face on your company
- Increasing the reach of your announcements
Eavesdropping on Customer Conversations
You can eavesdrop on customer conversations by subscribing to queries that search for specific keywords in the Twitterverse. To subscribe to a Twitter search query:
- Go to http://search.twitter.com and type your product name (for example, Camtasia).
- Click Search. As needed, refine your search by adding + before words you require and – before words you want to omit. You can also enclose phrases in parentheses.
- Click the Feed for this query link (circled in the image below) and add the feed to your news reader, such as Google Reader.
Link to the RSS feed for this Twitter search query
Tip: While you’re setting up product search queries, head over to Icerocket and set up the same keyword search across blogs and other online sites.
Why exactly would you want to eavesdrop on Twitter? Michael Arrington says Twitter provides companies “an excellent early warning system to flag possible brand implosions.” In other words, when people are complaining about your product, you’ll be well aware and may even head off a product crisis.
In fact, Arrington has an entire post narrating his experience of twittering negatively about Comcast. Arrington writes:
Within 20 minutes of my first Twitter message I got a call from a Comcast executive in Philadelphia who wanted to know how he could help. He said he monitors Twitter and blogs to get an understanding of what people are saying about Comcast, and so he saw the discussion break out around my messages.
(Thanks, Anne, for the link.)
Puting a Personal Face on Your Company
In the following Commoncraft video, Lee Lefever explains the point of Twitter is to allow your friends to know what goes on in your life between the emails and blog posts. Almost no other virtual medium allows this glimpse in to the personal space of your life as Twitter does.
To put a personal face on your company, you can encourage your product evangelists to twitter. I follow Betsy Weber, a product evangelist for TechSmith (makers of SnagIt and Camtasia). Betsy travels a lot. It’s interesting to see where she’s going (often the latest conference) and what she’s doing. I do feel a little closer to SnagIt and Camtasia by following her on Twitter.
I also follow Sharon Burton, a product manager at Madcap Flare. Her presence on Twitter makes Madcap more accessible to me. While I was beta testing Flare 4, I once expressed that it was a little discouraging. Seeing my comment, she called me to talk about my concerns.
Increasing the Reach of Your Announcements
Although using Twitter to only broadcast announcements isn’t good Twitterquette, it’s a good idea to include announcements about upgrades, new products, special events, etc., in your Twitter feed. A lot of people are drowning in RSS feeds, and they can easily miss a title floating through their RSS readers. Others have stopped using RSS altogether and rely solely on Twitter. Emails are problematic because they’re associated with all the other spam in your inbox.
By including announcements in your Twitter feed, you increase your reach. Additionally, those who search for keywords on Twitter will more likely find you.
Are you using Twitter in your documentation? If so, I’d like to hear how.
Tags: brand, brevity, conversations, icerocket, RSS search queries, short documentation, snippets, Twitter
Thanks for using and helping to spread the word!
Blake Rhodes
IceRocket.com
Good post. I would even name it “Does Twitter Fit into Your Branding Strategy?”
(and as usual when I stop by your website your name get’s me. Every time. I’d rather be writing too
btw, you should make it easier to find your twitter (http://twitter.com/tomjohnson) in your posts
Best,
http://twitter.com/gillberg
Peter, thanks for the title recommendation. I agree that Twitter is more about branding than any type of documentation, so I changed the title as you suggested.
Re making my Twitter button more visible, yes, I’ll do that. Thanks for the feedback.
Thank you for the kind shout out. I just want to make sure people are doing well with our products. I like to help. good post, tho. I didn’t know about the search feature. Good tip1
I haven’t seen this implemented anywhere yet, but I think the RSS syndication of Twitter tweets could give you great re-use of micro-content. It would be cool to provide a Twitter feed of tips and tricks for your software, and embed that content in your help’s main page or as a sidebar in a web page or wiki page.
[...] Does Twitter Fit into Your Branding Strategy? [...]
Interesting story about Comcast. I didn’t think about it that way. I am not a twitter user but is there a special alert you can set up for your brand name?
Hi nice post, i have come across your site once before when searching for something so i was just wondering something. I love your theme, would it happen to be a free one i can download, or is it a custom one you had made? In a few weeks i will be launching my own site, i’m not great with designs but i really like the style of your site so it would be cool if i could find (or pay for) something with a similar look.
Thanks!
[...] http://www.idratherbewriting.com/2008/12/01/does-twitter-fit-into-your-documentation-strategy/ [...]
Hi Tom,
Some great points raised, I agree that Twitter is a great tool for “keeping your ear to the ground” so to speak, and picking up on sentiment toward your brand quickly and early. (this of course on the assumption that you’re not using an ORM tool like Trackur or BrandsEye)
Twitter should definitely be regarded as one of the many branded tools corporates and individuals make use of, including blogs, Facebook and, where applicable Flickr.
I think it’s important to also stress that interaction is important. It’s not just about outgoing tweets, but also interacting with incoming tweets and replies. Barack Obama lost some of his lustre when he stopped tweeting after the elections (don’t really blame him though, guess he’s pretty busy now
have you ever considered monetizing this blog with inlinks? i think it has some pretty good potential. pay my blog a visit if you want to learn about some strategies.
Nice post!! It would be interesting to explore social media and how it relates directly to search engine optimization…
Social media marketing helps mainly with creating the global link popularity that is essential to high rankings…
Nice post…I haven’t seen this implemented anywhere yet, but I think the RSS syndication of Twitter tweets could give you great re-use of micro-content. It would be cool to provide a Twitter feed of tips and tricks for your software, and embed that content in your help’s main page or as a sidebar in a web page or wiki page.
I just want to make sure people are doing well with our products. I like to help. good post, tho. I didn’t know about the search feature. Good tip1. It would be interesting to explore social media and how it relates directly to search engine optimization…
You have a great blog here and it is Nice to read some well written posts that have some relevancy…keep up the good work
Twitter has become so much fun to use, now that there are so many new tools to play with.