How and Why to Launch a Business Presence on Twitter

From an upstart airline to the cable company some people love to hate, organizations big and small have reaped success in improving customer service, receiving R&D tips, and marketing their products on Twitter. Here's expert advice on how and why your business should tap into Twitter.

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Companies that have enjoyed success on Twitter echo this sentiment. Frank Eliason runs the Twitter handle @comcastcares, which allows the cable company's customers to ask service questions. With more than 11,000 followers to date, most analysts consider the efforts by Eliason, Comcast's Director of Digital Care, to be a brilliant effort to reshape the cable company's poor reputation for customer service.

"We started listening to Twitter back in February, 2008 before we started actively tweeting," Eliason says, who started posting to Twitter in April, 2008.

During this research period, Eliason used Twitter's basic search tool, which he found sufficient. Some social media measuring tools can delve deeper into tweets (messages on Twitter) about your company. In a recent research note about businesses using Twitter, Owyang listed a few of these tools, including Andiamo, Infegy and Radian6.

You also might set up a personal Twitter account to see what makes this community tick. That's how Morgan Johnston, Jetblue's manager of corporate communications, built his own Twitter presence ( @MHJohnston) before setting up Jetblue's popular Twitter page ( @jetblue), which has more than 155,000 followers to date.

Establish Your Twitter Objectives and Metrics for Success

Before you can set up a Twitter profile, you need to establish what goals you hope to accomplish by being on Twitter. The expectations you set should be two-fold. The first goal: internally justify your efforts to your company. Twitter remains a nascent technology, and in a tough economic time, you need to make a good case as to why someone should be dedicating his or her time to it, in addition to traditional marketing and customer service channels such as e-mail, web advertising (through Google) or even Facebook.

For Comcast's Eliason, the objective was easy to communicate.

"We wanted to use Twitter as a place to have conversations from our customers, get feedback, and when possible, help them," he says.