Follow

An article by Gazimoff    1 Comment

To follow or not to follow? It started off as a simple enough question asked by Glen Le Santo yesterday over twitter. Is there a form of twitter etiquette that suggests that you should follow back everyone that follows you? Needless to say, the responses were many and varied but most seemed to be selective about who they follow back. It seems that for most of us we tend to read up on who our followers are, scanning through their previous tweets and deciding if it’s someone we’re interested in following. Some of us prefer to defer the decision by a couple of weeks then check back, or unfollow if the person doesn’t seem to be engaging with their followers. Straightforward enough, and all seems sensible so far.

The question then evolved to one of business – should businesses just soak up followers, never follow up and just tweet broadcast, or should they use it as a tool to engage their followers and respond to queries as well? This one’s a trickier question to answer, and really needs to be broken down into chunks in order to understand how businesses are using Twitter already and how they can develop this in the future.

The passive monitor

It’s no secret that firms already monitor the internet for discussions involving them and their products. References cropped up during the twitter discussion, while anyone who runs a blog or similar will have seen the various media monitoring firms scan their articles whenever a particular business name crops up. It’s natural for this to extend into publicly viewable social networks such as twitter, where keyword searches are easy to perform and can provide instant results on what people are saying or linking to when discussing the firms they interact with. For some businesses, this is as far as their involvement with social networks goes.

The broadcaster

In previous years, it was the email newsletter, the RSS feed or the “news” webpage that kept customers informed about new products or services that a business was launching. Nowadays, Twitter feeds and Facebook fan pages are beginning to replace RSS as the medium of choice when informing customers about recently added product lines. News publishers are starting to use Twitter to announce new articles, with even blog authors getting in on the act of announcing when a new post has gone up. It’s a simple idea, but it only uses one half of a social network’s potential. Users become familiar with the concept of two-way communication, and can quickly get turned off if it becomes too businesslike or mundane.

The engager

Possibly the hardest trick to master is becoming more engaging with customers using social networks. Customers prefer businesses that follow them back, and perceive that those who don’t are usually unengaging broadcasters. Customers prefer to have relationships with the businesses they use, and some of them are now starting to use Twitter as a natural extension to this. Having said that, people understand that not all firms should be on Twitter and that it largely depends on what typeof business they’re in and what they’d use the service for.

The main concern when a business looks at using Twitter is cost – will it require substantial investment to engage with customers over Twitter? There’s no reason to suggest it would – customers already have access to their suppliers via phone, email or even face-to-face in a high street store. Corporations may be fearful of a deluge of complaints heading their way through social networks, without realising that their great power is being able to gain instant feedback and respond to everyone at once instead of having to send out individual replies.

One thing that all forms should be aware of is how customers want to engage with them and being able to cater for that. It doesn’t mean having to set up shop on every single social network, but making sure that the business has a suitable presence on ones that customers are using already is a sensible move. It’s what separates your local family butcher from a local electrical retailer – you would expect the latter to be more responsive to social networks than the former. It’s also sensible to understand what your customers prefer to use each medium for – do they prefer to phone up to discuss billing issues, do they prefer the high street store when looking to make a purchase? How does it interlink with other ways in which you support customers online – do you provide self-service or self-help online, or even live chat support? With each of these things, the likelihood of customers contacting a business via Twitter about these issues is reduced.

The future

Indications are that Twitter and social networks in general should be examined by all firms seeking to put together a communications strategy that involves some online aspects. Their strategic choices on how they build and use online presences will affect how customers perceive them, and should be considered carefully. One thing is clear though – more study and research is required in this area in order for businesses to become more comfortable with how hey handle this medium.

Communications constantly change. Call centres, email responses and online help tools are all examples of how business has needed to evolve in order to keep in contact with customers. All the indications are that this will continue to happen, with instant messaging, Google Wave and VOIP all becoming potential additions in how customers may want to interact. Social networks form a part of this evolutionary change, and it is important for business to keep them on the radar when forming plans. The challenge will be making sure these plans are developed and constantly refreshed as the communication landscape changes.