Regardless of whether you’re using Twitter for personal or business reasons, you have a voice. I broke down what I feel my Twitter-voice is in my last post, but it’s easy when you’re the one in charge of the keyboard for your personal account. The challenge is having a consistent voice across the board for a large company/brand. Too many people tend to play a part in content creation and social interaction at the same time. The persona then gets muddled, and that’s when your message can be lost.
In my professional opinion, the best approach is to establish governance, and develop guidelines for everything that is pushed out to the public via the brand handle. Know your voice, objectives, goals and purpose, and that should give you a pretty good start constructing a solid presence on the platform.
From my experience working at Fortune 500 companies within the social space, I have learned there are many components that go into the social approach. The easiest way to begin breaking down the content is into two buckets: organic content and customer care. Organic consists of anything that comes via your @handle, which your entire following (audience) can see, from marketing messages, images, articles, to RT/MT’s. Customer care is the bucket that contains the one-on-one interactions, mostly between the designated reps and the public – i.e. always begins with @_____. There’s another dotted-line category, though, which certain companies break off into a grouping called community management. This usually falls under the organic bucket, since someone who is very close to the brand activations and initiatives must manage this approach.
