18th
Proper Twitter Etiquette
In the past I have written a few posts around what is appropriate when engaging in conversations on Twitter about your product. Today we had a bunch of Twitter chatter going on around PhoneTag.
It started with this post from Mark Suster: @bfeld @pkedrosky - if you’re willing to pay for voice transcriptions Phonetag is pretty awesome
Then, Brad Feld responded with, @msuster yeah - i’ve used phonetag for over a year.
Then, Phil Michaelson joined in with @bfeld @msuster i replaced phonetag with goog voice for vmail transcriptions. goog’s quality seems lower, but price is 100% cheaper
Then, Andrew Watson sent out @bfeld @msuster @sanjay we’re evaluating a few vendors for high quality transcription for @othernum (@phonetag is one of them)
And finally, Bijan posted, @bfeld I have high hopes for google voice in the future but for now, I like PhoneTag’s transcription better & I don’t like GoogleVoice SMS
The only thing that I responded to was the tweet from Andrew Watson, which I said, @andrewwatson for PhoneTag if you have any questions email me j@phonetag.com. Thanks to @bijan @msuster @bfeld for the twit love today
Here are my rules for twitter engagement:
1. I will never use it to win a customer from a competitor. An example of this is when someone tweets out that they love your competitors service. Phil’s tweet above is where this gets a bit grey area for me. He was a customer, still likes us but has moved to a free solution. I decided not to tweet him because he knows what we offer, our pricing has not changed and he seems to be making the decision based on price.
2. I try not to join into conversations that I should not be in. When Mark was talking to Brad in the first tweet above, my entering in the conversation would have been a bit weird.
3. Where I can add value I tweet back as I did with Andrew’s post.
4. Also depending on the company/message will depend on who should do the tweets. In my view it is not appropriate to have a person doing “twitter bot” type of responses to people. This is why for PhoneTag I currently do all of the tweets. If it were to become too much then I would figure out how to scale it better but for now this works and it keeps me very close to the action.
Overall for me the rules our simple for joining in the conversation with Twitter or other Social Networks, just because you can see and enter a conversation does not always make it a appropriate. Abuse it and you can really harm your brand.
