Community management

Join the conversation

Conversation thrives on Twitter, making it an optimal place for businesses to build relationships and community via one-to-one interactions. In many cases, those interactions will be visible to your followers, further amplifying the reach and impact of your efforts.

When it comes to interacting with Tweets, there are three primary options –– each with their own benefits:

Find your brand voice

When building your community on Twitter, it’s helpful to identify and encourage opportunities to connect. Some suggestions:

• Ask questions or use Twitter Polls to spark conversation
• Where it makes sense, use GIFs, emojis, memes, or text-only Tweets to humanize communication and encourage interaction
• Communicate if there’s a specific action you want readers to take (“Retweet if you’re excited for our new release!”) 
• Stay on top of trends and opportunities to join existing conversations
• Use Twitter chats to regularly engage a group around a particular topic

Find your brand voice

Twitter is a place to showcase the most human side of your brand. This may sound a bit wittier, bolder, or more current than a voice you’d use on other platforms.

Looking to get started? Download the “Find your voice on Twitter” worksheet for exercises to help you:

• Establish guardrails: What are the terms or topics you want to lean towards or away from?
• Develop a persona for your account: If your brand was a person, what would they be like?
• Create practice Tweets: Draft Tweets to get feedback and reviews

Social listening on Twitter

There are conversations happening all across Twitter every day that your business can participate in. Here are four tips for finding them:

• Advanced search: Use Twitter advanced search to find Tweets by date, keywords, @account, number of engagements, and more. Save searches for future use.
  
• Twitter Lists: Lists allow you to sort accounts you want to monitor. The ability to add public @accounts to lists –– even if you don’t follow them –– and to make lists private, make them a powerful feature for monitoring conversations. Here are 4 must-have Twitter lists to get started.
  
• Tweetdeck: Monitor multiple search queries, lists, and inboxes side-by-side with this free tool.
  
• What’s Trending: Monitor trends on the explore tab to see what conversations are happening in real-time. You can tap into these when there’s a good fit.

Pro-tip: 

Take time to unplug. Stepping away from your screen can help you avoid burnout and come back to your community refreshed. 

Customer support

Twitter’s real-time engagement makes it a valuable tool for providing customer support. Here are some tips for building your strategy:

• Add the hours of available support to your profile along with any other instructions
• Be timely. Even if you can’t provide support right away, reply to let your customers know you’ve seen their Tweet and will be in touch
• For longer exchanges –– or anything requiring the exchange of personal information –– suggest moving the conversation into a Direct Message
• If volume and resources allow, consider creating a separate account for support