Twitter is a very popular and free social networking site that is also treated as a micro-blogging service enabling all its users to read and send messages that are known as the tweets. Tweets are basically text-based posts that can be of around 140 characters. These tweets are displayed mainly on the profile page of an author and are delivered to the subscribers of the author that are also known as followers. However, Senders can very easily restrict delivery of their messages to those who are present in their friends circle or, can also have open access.
At twitter users can easily send and receive all the tweets by using the Twitter website, external publications or Short Message Service. These days twitter is mainly used by all the business companies to highlight their progress, products, and services. Though Twitter was originally developed for providing a means of communication to the individuals, but now a number of different organizations have begun to use it for different purposes. It has been seen that all the companies are not using Twitter in just the same way. It can be seen that some of them are just tweeting, while some of them are listening, and there are some savvy companies who are doing both the activities.
Today there are four different main ways that are being used by companies to use twitter . These are direct, internal, indirect, and signaling.
Direct: many companies are making use of Twitter in the form of a public relations or a marketing channel, like a medium to provide extension to the corporate blogs. They post everything about their corporate accomplishments and also distribute links that can link people to their corporate web pages, promotional sites and press releases. Though this method is considered as the easiest way to start, but it is important for the companies to be aware of the fact that using Twitter in this way can lower down their image in twitter community.
Indirect: this is method that is used by many companies where they allow their employees to tweet for them. Here the employees make use of Twitter so that they can enhance companies and their own reputations.
Employees can twitter about their excitement regarding the work, developments that are taking place in their industry, interesting tidbits, and new products.
Internal: this method is used by those companies who want to share their ideas and want to communicate about their projects internally. This technique for micro blogging can be used with the help of other tools like yammer to secure the updates.
Inbound Signaling: this method is used by those companies that are mainly twitter listeners and are not active twitter participants. Here they make use of various search tools like search. twitter .com or other desktop applications such as Tweet Deck to keep track of what all is going around in the company regarding its new policies, products, etc.
Ford has been twitter to promote its products. It has maintained an exciting and very unique Q&A forum where people can post their tweets and then the company replies them back. Here people are free to tweet all their questions, suggestions and concerns. Besides these ford also posts all its internal news. Some of the cool ford twitters are: fordCustService, FordDriveGreen, FordDriveOne, FordTrucks, fordRacing, FordRacingNWide, FordMustang, etc.
Joining ford in the race is Dell that has created a number of its profiles on twitter , each one of them is meant for different purpose and different types of deals. For example: Dell outlet posts is mainly used to post or publish all the new offers regarding dell computers so that it can update all its customers about all the company deals and codes of coupons.
Source by T. Michael Rogers
Business and Twitter
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