If you’re twittering on behalf of your company or in a primarily professional capacity, you’ve got a few additional challenges to make your Twitter account successful. Here we discuss additional considerations and ideas to make your company’s twittering really sing.

If you want examples of other companies on Twitter, check out TrackingTwitter, which lists brands, media, television and celebrities. Twibs, another directory, isn’t limited to brands. ExecTweets showcases the twittering of businesspeople.

Incidentally, if you’re interested in internal micromessaging for your organization—which a lot of companies find to be an inbox-freeing revelation—two of the top providers are Yammer and Present.ly.

Twitter Tip Some companies and consultants build customer relationships by keeping an eye on Twitter search for questions they can answer, and then carefully approaching the person who's asked the question. If you use this method, be sensitive to the fact that people might not want to hear from you.

The biggest mistake we see companies make when they first hit Twitter is to think about it as a channel to push out information. In fact, it turns out to be a great medium for holding conversations rather than for making announcements.

People aleady on Twitter will expect your corporate account(s) to engage with them, so before you start twittering away, spend a few weeks or so understanding the ways people talk about you. Get a sense for the rhythms of conversation on Twitter, and think about how you'll hold conversations.

No matter your sector, chances are that people are already twittering about your products, your brand, your company or at least your industry.

What will be different in three months, six months

or a year because we’ve engaged on Twitter?

Because it’s so lightweight, Twitter may tempt you to just dive in and give it a try. Which is a reasonable approach if you’re an individual.

But for companies, an unfocused stab at twittering can lead to accounts that don’t represent the business well or that conflict with other communication channels. Twitter is littered with corporate accounts that somebody started with good intentions but then abandoned after a short period, leaving a permanent, public record of corporate neglect. In addition, twittering can suck up staff time; why assign resources to Twitter if you don’t know what you’re hoping to get out of it?

Twitter gives you an unparalleled opportunity to build relationships with customers and other constituents, and we suggest you think of it in those terms, rather than as part of a campaign. That said, you can do yourself a big favor by spending some time thinking through what you’d most like to get out of your account or accounts and whether you’ll measure that.

Your goals might include things like: better serving your existing customers; increasing your customer base; offering customer service; connecting with potential partners; and so forth.

Twitter is cool, but it’s not magic. It’s part of your communications toolkit, and it probably fits with at least a few of your departments or functions: customer service, PR, marketing, product development, human resources, etcetera—all of whom are using a bunch of tools to connect with people.

For instance, if you think of your account as an information booth where you share tips, links, promos and so forth, but people come to you with questions and complaints, your company needs to be able to respond with appropriate information. We’ve too often seen corporate accounts that post messages like, “@customer: That’s a shame. Call us to get the problem resolved.” And then there’s no phone number given. For a customer who’s already having a problem, that sort of reply simply amps up her frustration. Much better to provide specific contact info, or even take the conversation to DM, get the customer’s contact info, and then have customer service follow up.

To have accounts that truly engage on behalf of your company, make sure people throughout your organization are aware of any corporate twittering and that you have some basic systems set up to route and resolve inquiries and complaints. Of course, if you spend time listening, as we recommend earlier in this chapter, you’ll be able to plan ahead for the kinds of queries you might need to field.

In addition to integrating with your departments, coordinate your Twitter, Facebook and other social media accounts to provide consistent information.

A big concern execs—and pretty much everyone—has about Twitter is that it will be a black hole of time for employees. And it can be.

To avoid that problem altogether, start slow, posting perhaps once a day or just a few times a week and answering questions several times a day. Then, if the account proves useful, start devoting more time and resources to it. If it doesn’t pan out, you haven’t put a hard-to-justify amount of time into it.

Here we use TweetStats to look at the Twitter activity for Des Moines' Mars Café. They started off slow, found Twitter to be a useful tool, and then amped up their posting. (The last month is low because at the time of this screenshot, the month had just started.)

Twitter is a social medium. So if you have to choose between a person who has perfect information to share but doesn’t really get or like twittering and a person who totally embraces the medium, choose the latter. Then find a way to support that person with extra information and access to the people who tend to be your knowledge hubs.

Incidentally, we can’t recommend outsourcing your twittering to a PR, ad or marketing agency. While that might appear to be an appealing time-saver, it’s highly unlikely to yield the kinds of relationships that customers expect, and it could easily backfire if people get the feeling they’re being sold to.

In fact, some of the most successful Twitterers are also the busiest. Check out ExecTweets for a list of C-level businesspeople who twitter. Some executive Twitterers (like @timoreilly or @JohnAByrne) share the information flow of their business; others, like @zappos, mostly share the flow of their lives. But it doesn’t have to be an either/or deal: check out how effectively Tony Hsieh promotes Zappos on his Twitter page!

The biggest opportunity Twitter gives you is the chance to show the personality and humanness behind your organization. When you do so, you create the Petri dish in which you can grow conversations with people and establish relationships on a relatively intimate level.

But people aren't interested in connecting with a nameless, faceless entity. So once you've decided who's going to do the twittering for your company, be absolutely sure to identify him or her on your Twitter account page.

In your profile settings (under Settings > Account), use the Name field to identify the company, and then use the 160-character Bio to identify the person or people behind the account.

The right-side bio for this PR Newswire account says, "I'm Vicky, PR Newswire's Director of Audience Development. I love to chat about the who-what-when-where of media/social media." Then she's filled out the rest of the profile nicely and taken identification a beautiful step further by creating a custom background that includes her picture, email address and a more detailed bio.

When people connect with this account, they really know who they're getting.

If you’ve got more than one person twittering from an account, you need a way to identify the crew. It’s a good idea to have a three-pronged approach:

1. Include names in the 160-character Bio. That’s the place that search engines look for information, and it’s also the place the Twitter API will draw from to represent your account in third-party clients and applications. Of course, 160 characters isn’t much room, and you may wind up just listing first names and perhaps the team department.

2. Create a custom background, like the one shown here, to identify everyone. The vast majority of people will see your account on the Twitter website, and a custom background like this—which includes the name, picture, personal accounts and initials for each person—is a great way to go.

3. Sign messages with the initials of whomever is posting. Just prefix the initials with a piece of punctuation to help signal that it’s a signature.

Twitter Tip To help people find and understand your various accounts, have them talk to each other. They can retweet one another, refer to each other, and exchange messages. No need to overdo it but don't avoid interaction either.

It's one thing to have multiple people twittering from the same organizational account, but what if you've got several corporate accounts? Identify your array of accounts in two obvious places to help people understand which ones will be of interest to them.

1. Create a page on your website that lists all the accounts. As you can see here, Dell—which has dozens of Twitter accounts—has grouped them, and then listed the icon and a description for each account; it's also linked not only to the described account but to the personal account of the person who maintains it.

2. In your custom background, list other relevant Twitter accounts. For example, if you have a few customer service accounts, show all of those. For a good illustration, see http://twitter.com/comcastcares.

A common mistake organizations make on Twitter is filling out the profile in a way that makes it hard for people to find your company when they search for you (under Find People > Find on Twitter).

The problem arises when you use the Name field to list the person who does the twittering. Instead, put the company name there, and describe the person in the Bio field. Why? Because Twitter's search looks in the Name field, not the Bio to determine whether the account somebody is searching for exists. And in the vast majority of cases, people search for your company name, not your employee's name.

In addition, the Name rather than the username is what Twitter uses when it emails somebody to say you've followed her. So if your account name is GeneralElectric, but your Name is Joe Smith, people will get notifications that Joe Smith is following them, and they may not realize the account is really for GE.

Twitter is a terrific medium for conversation, and it’s what people on the system expect. In fact, if you refrained from one-way PR blasts and instead participated in lots of exchanges, you’d be using Twitter in a way that you can’t do with any other communication channels.

What does conversation look like? A lot of @messages. This Hoovers account is a good example: three of the four messages you can see are @replies, and the top message uses the @ convention to refer to the author of the article listed. Increasingly, corporate and organizational accounts look like this. (Remember: @replies are usually seen only by people following both parties to the conversation. So if you want your reply to be seen by all your followers, don’t put the @ at the very beginning of the tweet.

Retweeting is an essential part of the way people hold conversations on Twitter. To really be part of the community, then, do as the Romans do and retweet people.

Doing so shows them respect and amplifies their voices—both great actions for building relationships. It also shows that you have similar interests (as in the Kodak example here), or that you’re happy to help get their question answered (as in the JetBlue example).