Two things happened last week that demonstrated perfectly to me just what it is to Tweet on behalf of your company.
How to do it, or how not to.
I was followed last week by a company who shall remain nameless but who provided a service I happened to need a couple of days later. So I tweeted them and asked for a quote.
No repsonse.
No response for five days. Even beyond the time when I needed them, by which point I had found an alternative company who were quite pleased with me giving them close to £70.
When I did get a reply it said “sorry, only just seen this. Been really busy. What can we do for you?”
Okay, fair point but what kind of customer service is that? And too late. Already lost the sale. You have been busy means “sorry, you aren’t important to us so we ignored you”. Suffice to say, I won’t be giving them a second chance. Nor will I be recommending them to friends.
Fast forward to Friday when I tweeted “Dear Amazon, you have 26 minutes to deliver my parcel before 1pm or I shall be cross”.
I got a Tweet from Enchanted Wood (@ewtoys) asking me if they could help. They are a toy shop in the next town, Farnham, with branches in Guildford and Haslemere, and if my parcel was a toy they might be able to help me out.
Sadly it wasn’t a toy but what a great piece of customer service. I hadn’t heard of them before <blush> but we exchanged tweets and I discovered they really were just down the road.
“Come on kids, lets go and have a look”
We went, we spent £50, we came home. I have Tweeted about them, I am now blogging about them.
Both small companies. Both running a business and doing their own Tweeting, not employing “a social media expert” but widely different approaches.
Conclusion? If you are going to be on Twitter on behalf of your company, be on it. Don’t join up and then ignore it. The whole point of Twitter is to interact. To respond to queries. To see what is being said about you and reply. Build up a presence. Not to ignore potential customers. Or actually more importantly, ignore current customers who might be complaining or asking a question.
On Twitter these days it isn’t so much survival of the fittest but survival of the chattiest.
Image courtesy of Shutterstock
I see it all the time..Tesco have it covered on Twitter, they’re on the ball, they check their mentions, and their name frequently, even if you don’t @ to them, they get back to you. When will companies realise there is more to SEO and customer relations than retweeting every gushing piece of nonsense, and saying hello when they sign in. It’s actively seeking out your customers, or potential customers, actually sorting out things that have gone wrong, quickly and with as least stress possible. Twitter is like a car. Bloody invaluable but dangerous in the wrong hands. If they’re not capable of doing that, they should just stay away from it. Ooh I could write a book. The company that sent a blogger a raggedy dress, for review, and then started to shame her when she didn’t write the review. Every word from them made it ten times worse. The company that issued ‘cease and desist’ on bloggers for copying a manicure that was already massive in the blogosphere, and spread into a ‘trash campaign’ on Twitter. Untold real damage done to real companies with peoples wages depending on them, all because some fools read a couple of ebooks and thought they could run a ‘little twitter’ account.