How to stay out of trouble on Twitter
Posted on April 2, 2013 by Danielle Faber
The measure of a great social media manager is directly related to how visible the manager is. Let me explain. When the social media manager himself is hardly visible, this is how you know they are effective at their work.
A social media manager is meant to be the voice of a brand, not the voice of a person who is speaking for the brand. This becomes especially true when one person is speaking for multiple brands, which is almost always the case when social media is outsourced to an agency.
There have been many slip-ups in the past that proved there really is a human being behind the avatar. For example, Chrysler tweeting out their distaste for Detroit drivers, or the City of Vaughan cursing fellow community members for parking on the street.
Left: Social Media Manager mis-tweets from Chrysler account. Right: City of Vaughan Tweeter has some anger issues
There are ways to avoid these slip-ups though, and I made a list of the most effective.
1. Use social media management software.
Tweeting from outside of Twitter is a great way to aggregate all of your accounts in one place. They also allow you to visually differentiate between all of the accounts being managed so it’s easy to see where you’re tweeting from. In my opinion, the most effective ones are Hootsuite for management and Social Bro for analytics in conjunction with management.
2. Separate personal from corporate.
It’s so easy to tweet your f*ckin’ awesome weekend plans from your corporate Twitter account that is managed from your personal iPhone, so keep it separate. You can keep your Twitter app personal and your Hootsuite app corporate, or vice-versa, to make sure you don’t make an embarrassing mistake for you and your company.
3. Keep your info appropriate.
I’m not here to censor anyone’s personal creative outlets, but as a social media manager I know how important online personality is. And I also know how public it is. If you want to maintain a respectable online persona that will be helpful rather than detrimental in your “real life”, make sure your Tweets reflect your professional side. I’m not saying that there should be no sign of life behind those tweets, just that we can leave the overtly offensive stuff behind.
Danielle is a Social Media Coordinator at 88 Creative. Follow her on Twitter @DFabes .
Good advise. I hope those who use Twitter heed your precautions to keep personal and business tweets completely separate.
Keep tweeting
Sarah
Good advice and I definitely agree: Keep the personal out of the business! Although i find It interesting how this tends to work as a one way street— It is (in my opinion) perfectly okay to tweet about your business from your personal twitter. In fact, it can work to garner the attention of a whole new group of people.
Why don’t we see it as pushy or crossing a line when we advertise our business on our personal twitter/ facebook?
Good read!
Tamar