Generic Tweets vs. Strategic Tweets on Twitter

Twitter is one social media site where I often notice you truly get what you pay for if you are having someone outside your own company do your tweeting for you.

What do I mean?

I was asked to review someone's social media presence. The tweet about nice weather for Halloween threw me off because this has nothing to do with the person's company, his brand, or his area of expertise.

When I asked about the tweet, he told me that his company pays for an outside company to do these kinds of tweets throughout the month.

Especially as he has several knowledgeable employees in his company, it would be much better from a strategic marketing perspective for his employees to tweet about interesting items connected to the company's business.

At Miller Mosaic we believe that more than one person can tweet for a company. Yet we also believe that these tweets should be part of a strategic marketing plan and not simply generic tweets that anyone on Twitter could write.

If the concept of social media marketing is to help you and your company stand out from your competition, it is unlikely that generic tweets will help you do this.

In addition, generic tweets are unlikely to produce conversations with your prospective target markets. For example, there is not much to reply about the weather being nice for Halloween.

Your best Twitter strategy is to share information relevant to what your company offers – and sharing this information in a way that reflects real people tweeting rather than a generic sequence of tweets.

The first step for strategic tweeting is to actually have a marketing strategy for Twitter. This does NOT mean tweeting your product descriptions one by one.

It does mean deciding how your company will be positioned on Twitter and how your tweets will relate to your long-term marketing goals.

The second step is to find people who can create individual tweets that support this Twitter marketing strategy. (And it helps if they use spellcheck for their tweets.) These people also need to be able to engage with tweet mentions of you or your company.

For more useful social media marketing info, sign up now to get email notifications of social media blog posts at www.millermosaicllc.com/get-miller-mo...

© 2010 Miller Mosaic, LLC

Phyllis Zimbler Miller (@ZimblerMiller on Twitter) and her business partner Yael K. Miller (@MillerMosaicLLC on Twitter) are committed to taking the mystery out of social media so that individuals and companies can utilize the power of social media to attract more business.