Corporate twitter accounts need to be run with the same level of professionalism and understanding as any public relations activity (PR) but there are some special considerations for the medium and the audience.  In this post I’m outlining my 10 tips for corporate twitterers from the view point of a member of their audience.  A well run twitter feed will add a new, closer connection to your brand, a badly run one will destroy a reputation, just take the case of Habitat

1. Be Human Twitter is all about engaging people and robots aren’t particularly good at holding a conversation.  Blandly pushing out information makes your account far less useful than you think. Remember, it’s not about pushing information it’s about sharing it and sharing is a two way thing: when you share people feel included, when you push, they fall over. 
2. Reply Engaging and sharing means that the people who are listening to you will want to give you feedback and on twitter that means they will @reply to you.  It’s kind of rude to ignore that, (you wouldn’t if you were having a conversation,) so try to respond to people.  If you’ve got a wildly popular account, with hundreds of thousands (or millions) of followers, it might be hard to reply to individuals.  Put the effort in, be sure to reply to at least some and if you’re getting the same question en mass, then it’s probably time to tweet something useful in reply to everyone.
3. Twitter is a public conversation This point echoes two and three above but it’s an important metaphor to understand, and it explains Twitter’s popularity and appeal singularly. Imagine you’re in a room, a bar or pub say, and you’re having a conversation but you can hear the conversations that everyone else is having.  Now, if someone says something interesting, you can just launch into their conversation and they can do the same with yours. What’s helpful here is two things, firstly you need to say something interesting for others to listen to and secondly, you need to be ready to engage other people when they start listening.
4. Your company’s people make the best advocates Even better than having someone twitter on behalf of your company is to have the people in your company do the twittering.  If your people are passionate about what they do, they’ll want to talk about it; their passion will be far more real and they’ll make far better connections with customers (or potential customers or even just interested parties).  
5. Don’t over react If you put point 4 into practice your instinct will be to put out some guidelines for people to follow so that you can get your messages out there without them doing something silly.  The thing is they still will.  The only guideline is simple Would you feel comfortable saying it to your CEO?  Why is that all that’s needed?  Again a simple answer; people talk and as point 3 explains twitter is a conversation in public, and you probably don’t have a policy for that now.
6. Don’t outsource your twitter No matter how well you brief someone, if they don’t live and breathe your company they won’t be able to have a great conversation about its values.  People will see through it in an instant when they talk to someone who really does work for your company.
7. No matter what you do, you are in the customer service business  You’ve probably not started a twitter account just for the purposes of customer service, the thing is you need to understand that that’s precisely what you’re doing.  We’ve all become bogged down in the idea that good customer service is unique to each individual, somehow a bespoke service.  It needn’t be.  Customer service is about serving your customers and big part of that is keeping them informed.  So even if you aren’t in the customer service biz you’ll need to respond to customer’s questions and where you can put them through your regular service routes.  It’s OK to make exceptions, but do it too often and you’ll be swamped, too little and you won’t seem human.  Balance is the word, but never ignore.
8. Don’t try to make money from it if twitter isn’t your business don’t sell space in your tweets, it demeans your brand.  Don’t PUSH, PUSH, PUSH products, inform.  Twitter’s largest demographic is people who can make up their own mind with the information, 25 to 40s.
9. Don’t auto respond with Direct Messages when someone follows you  “AutoDM”, as it’s known, is the scourge of twitter, and nice folks don’t like it.  It’s robotic and inhuman.  It might seem nice to reply to every new follower to say “Hi!” but it soon becomes boring, annoys people and when someone follows 100 people in a day, they won’t read a single one of those DMs.  It is good to say "Hi!” though, ask your followers to introduce themselves and say why they’re following you, it’s market information in it’s most raw and micro form.
10. Keep up to date with twitter as a medium  Twitter changes faster than almost any technology on the planet.  They have this thing called an API that lets anyone who wants to develop new stuff that uses twitter, that means innovation and that means changes.  You need to keep up.  When twitter first start (all of about 2 years ago!) there were no pictures, twitpic and yfrog have taken off rapidly.  12seconds and Twitvid have excellent video services.  Mashups take peoples tweets and do cool stuff like plot them on maps (and Twitter will be getting more into this soon – it’s the next big thing).  It’s not just the bolt-ons that are important though, the content of tweets is critically important.  Take hashtags for example, that’s any word preceded by a # , these mark topics that people want to trend and can be locations (often used for a conference) or anything else to make finding their tweets in masses easier.

This is my top 10 of how to twitter for corporate twitterers.  It’s not conclusive, and I’m sure there are more that people will want to add, and agree or disagree with.  So comment, comment, comment.

[Images in this post from smashingmagazine.com]