Don’t Twit until you have who’d..

As the usage of the name Twitter rises in marketing articles from San Francisco to Soho (London Soho), its clear there is an awful temptation for brands to just jump straight in. Yet taking the time to understand what people are saying and just as importantly the tone of voice they are using is key to succesful twittering.

Brands can do this by the very useful Twitter search. I personally use TweetDeck so can do it through this application. What this is great for, unlike Google, is giving immediacy on search terms. Google just gives you the most popular results, Twitter takes it to a much more interesting level. A PR announcement? Twitter it. A product problem? Twitter it.

Anyway, Twitter search enables a really relevant and immediate search. However, what I also love about it, is that it enables you to see the tone of voice with which people refer to your brand or product term. This for me is extremely interesting as it opens up the sorts of terms that you may not necessarily connect with your brand. e.g. Ticketmaster would have been reeling from its bashing it got on Twitter recently.

It also shows how you can condense a very important message into 140 characters, something that ad agencies could really take an interest in.

So once we understand tone of voice and what people are saying we can start to connect. But how do we decide what we are going to do? Unfortunately some companies have gone out there and got twittering a bit too soon. Others like Comscore and Dell have taken a more measured approach and have seemingly set objectives for what they are trying to achieve.
What I don’t want, as a Twitter user, is constant sales messages from brands that I have signed up to follow. What I want to see is a bit of inventive marketing and push messaging. Hows about British Airways pushing travel guide content? e.g. We saw this article and thought it might interest you. What about brands retweeting interesting conversations they have seen or heard?