Archive for June, 2010

During a recent thunderstorm, many Duke Energy customers reported their power outages via Twitter. In January of 2009 Duke Energy set up a Twitter account, @DukeEnergyStorm, to keep their customers up to date on power outage problems. Their primary mission was to broadcast outage information. Then last fall they hired Lisa Hoffmann to help manage their social media. She and other staffers do the tweeting during major storms. And they are monitoring the tweets people are sending to them.

Twitter postings are not hindered by power outages if the users are using smart phones or personal computers that run off of battery power. That allows Duke Energy customers the ability to keep up to date with power outage status without making unnecessary phone calls.

This is a classic example of how a customer service company gets time sensitive information to it’s customers. How do you use Twitter for customer service?

TweetDeck is a free application that you can download onto your computer. It monitors your Twitter accounts. It also allows you to post onto Twitter and Facebook.

TweetDeck lets you create all kinds of sorting and filtering that helps maximize your time monitoring what people are Tweeting.

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Download TweetDeck

Go to TweetDeck.com and download the software. Then create some lists to follow and make some postings. It won’t take long for you to discover what a powerful tool this is.

There are a number to tools that help you maximize your use of Twitter.

Tools like Hashtags, Ping, Hootsuite, Tweet Later, Twollo, Twitter Local, and Tweet Deck are briefly explained in this video. Give some of them a try.

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What Kind Of Followers Do You Want?

The Quantity Of Followers

Some people have made it their mission to gain as many followers as possible. One way to do this is to follow other people. Many people out there will follow you when you follow them. I wouldn’t advise doing this. When you are inundated with thousands of tweets then they are worthless to you. You don’t have time to read them or filter to those of value.

The Quality Of Followers

From the point of view of a business you want people following you that see value in your posts. Choose to target only those people with an interest in your topic. You want them active and engaged in the subject. And with that being the case you are going to have relatively few followers.

If your topic is very general then your followers may be of larger numbers. But keep in mind when your Tweets are in a broad category you have many “competitors” that are doing the same thing. In such a case you need to post content that stands above the competition.

The more common thing for businesses to do is to Tweet about specialized topics. This is a way for businesses to display their expertise in focused areas. If you have more than one focus area then set up more than one Twitter account. And monitoring those various accounts may give you some ideas as to the needs of that market segment.