Plan ahead or this is what your Twitter efforts will produce

For the last year or so Social Media marketers have been working hard to convince brands that they should be on Twitter. Here’s one from just last week: 5 reasons why brands should be on Twitter. Last month Warren Sukernek reported on stories stating 97% of consumers want brands on Twitter. Are these people wrong, and these surveys misleading? Not exactly.  There are many good reasons for brands to be on Twitter and I do believe consumers want to engage brands directly. But in their rush to jump in the pool too many brands have taken a “ready, fire, aim!” approach. Just like any other marketing tool, Twitter needs to be implemented with intelligence. The worst thing isn’t not being on Twitter, it’s being on Twitter poorly. So with that in mind, here are Seven Reasons Your Brand Shouldn’t Be On Twitter:

 1. You can’t make the time commitment

I’ve seen it too many times. Five tweets one day, three the next and then silence for two weeks. This is the number one issue for many brands. A brand manager will be asked by someone internally (who has probably never even seen Twitter, let alone use it) to man the Twitter feed. Listening, responding and engaging all take time. They take time today and tomorrow and next week and next year. You don’t have to man the account 24/7/365 but it’s good to go in understanding that you’re probably going to spend more time than you originally anticipated.

2. You don’t know what you want to say

Should you respond to criticisms, push out press releases, send out sales messages or all of the above? Do you metion competitors, include details on who is tweeting or talk about the latest celebrity news? If you don’t have a gameplan before  you start tweeting, you’re going to end up spinning your wheels, trying to figure out what you should be saying, to whom and how you should be saying it. You can do a lot of things with Twitter, but you don’t have to do them all (and probably can’t effectively). Figure out how you can use Twitter in a way that maps back to your overall business objectives and stick to that.

3. You don’t know what you want to measure

College kids have plenty of free time and zero accountability, you don’t. If you don’t know what you are measuring, you can tweet till you’re blue in the face and not know whether your efforts are working. This of course requires you to know your objectives. Trying to drive website traffic? Then link click-through and retweets might be a good thing to measure.  Looking to change consumer opinion? Then sentiment and tonality may be more important. Figure this out before you begin.

4. You don’t know what success looks like

This is the other half of the measurement equation. Trying to acquire more followers? How many? How quickly? Without benchmarks you’re in a race with no finish line. 

5. Just because your competitor is

I hear this a lot too. “What are our competitors doing on Twitter?” You should definitely be monitoring your competition and the industry in general, but don’t fall into the ‘me too’ trap. Unless you can really stand out from your competitors, Twitter just becomes another battlefield you can’t win,  but are devoting resources to.

6. Just because your consumers are

This is another easy trap to fall into. Your customers are also on Facebook, and YouTube and mobile phones and they blog and they go to movies and baseball games and…  At some point you have to make some hard choices, and “because it exists” is not a good enough reason. Have your customers and potential customers expressed an interest in speaking with you via Twitter? If not, you run the risk of engaging them at a time and in a place where they are not comfortable seeing you.

7. You view Twitter as a stand-alone channel

Twitter is a rich, robust part of a larger Social Media ecosystem.  If you are utilizing Twitter in isolation you’re going to greatly reduce your opportunities and minimize your chance to see real returns on your investment. If your Twitter handle noted in your print ads? What about on the side of your packaging? The best use of Twitter is when you engage in a two way conversation. As a platform, you have to think of Twitter in a two-way perspective as well. Yes, you want to use Twitter to push people to your website or in-store, but how are you using those channels to push people to your Twitter feed. If you’re aren’t, you’re not maximizing your opportunities.

*For 10 more reasons, check out this AdAge piece from April.