So many companies are mystified by Twitter.  What should I do with Twitter? Who should be the appointed Twitter person? How often should they Twitter?

Frankly, there is no right answer and if someone says they have the perfect answer, run the other way because they want you to spend WAY too much money.

Twitter is imperfect. Twitter has failed a number of times, and throughout the day, it gets REALLY slow. So it’s quirky, but if you see the extremely cute whale image above, it’s not working. We say this to emphasize the fact that you don’t want to be hinging your strategy on something that slows to a crawl at weird times. Instead, use Twitter as an extra bit of promotion.

There are plenty of books on Twitter; we rather like Joel Comm and Ken Burge’s book on Twitter. Their best tips are online at our sister website BrandlandUSA.

Here are ours:

1. You need personality to make it work. If you get a boring person who is scared of authority and ask them to do the posts, you will get boring stuff.
2. You don’t need to spend a lot of time on it. One or two Tweets a day are enough. You just need to test the water. And next year, the mania for Twitter could be over, so you don’t want to commit too much time in something that might jump the shark, or so says web guru Yves Darbouze of pLot Multimedia of New York.
3. Don’t let your PR staff police the Twitter. Public relations staff are often used to CONTROLLING information and they will screw it up fast. They can ruin it. If your company hasn’t been Twittering, ask your PR person why not. However, if it is the PR staff that has suggested you start Twittering, you are safe and  you can allow the PR staff to Twitter. Twitter is cheap, easy and fast. Again, if your PR staff has not tried Twittering, you have a major problem in your organization, not because  they have missed some great new thing, but because there will inevitably be lots of “next things” and they need to be able to adapt to trends as they come.
4. Remember Twitter rhymes with Fritter. Time is money. You can waste a lot of time on stuff like Twitter. So just spend a few minutes on it. And keep time of how many hours your staff spends on it. If they spend 5 minutes a day on Twitter, it costs almost nothing.
5. Use it to praise customers. Use Twitter for reasons other than just to promote your company. Use it as a public list of bookmarks. Use it to keep notes on what you are working on. Use it to save embryonic ideas of your own.
6. Many people can have company Twitter accounts. For instance, Ford Motor has a Twitter feed; while it is from the “company”, the “authors” of the feed also have their own Twitter accounts that are listed just below the feed. This helps the company step back from the official-ness of the Twitter feed.
7. Hire a professional. Journalists are fast writers and can post Tweets quickly. They come cheap these days, and can give you good ideas on what to Tweet if you don’t have a clue.
8. Have a policy on what to Twitter; here at Black Cow Press we have developed a Social Media Rulesheet that we send to our customers. It is not so much a set of laws as a set of guidelines.
9. Use it as an index. Twitter is easily search-able, so saving items of interest on Twitter will help you and your customers find things later.
10. Use it to help SEO. Twitter is great for helping search engines find your web pages. While if you have a couple hundred followers, you might only get a few clicks from what you post. It doesn’t matter; you are helping the search engines find and categorize your pages.

Interested in Twitter and a Twitter strategy? Talk to us as we can get one up and running quickly, cheaply and with a minimum of problems.

Follow our Twitter at http://twitter.com/GarlandPollard. There, you will find some silly stuff, some useful stuff and other stuff. We’ll even re-Tweet your company, and get you in the game.