Twitter for business: what to post, how often, how to measure

Twitter passed 50 million tweets a day in February and the company says it is adding hundreds of thousands of accounts daily. More useful to you than the raw numbers: Google and Bing both signed deals late last year to show tweets in real-time search results, so a tweet about your product can now appear in a search for your product. Local newspapers, trade press and the bloggers in your category are on it, and they use it to find stories. Customers are using it to complain in public, and the brands that answer quickly are getting written up for doing so.

The platform is still simple. 140 characters, text and links, no official ad product for small businesses yet (the Promoted Tweets test is limited to a few large advertisers). That simplicity is the opportunity: a one-person shop can look as competent as a national chain if the tweets are good.

Most business accounts fail in the first ten minutes, before a tweet is sent.

1. Claim the handle that matches your business name, or the closest clean variant. Avoid underscores and numbers if you can.
2. Upload a real avatar. A logo is fine for a company account, but it must be legible at 48 pixels. The default egg icon reads as spam.
3. Write a bio that says what you do and where. "Family-owned HVAC repair in Tucson since 1987. Tweets by Maria and Dan." Include your city; a lot of discovery is local.
4. Link to your website, ideally a page that mentions Twitter so visitors know they are in the right place.
5. Use the custom background to show your phone number, hours and address. It is free real estate that most businesses waste.
6. Decide who tweets and write it down. One owner of the account, one or two trusted backups, and a shared password stored somewhere other than a sticky note.

The rule of thumb that works: for every tweet about yourself, post three or four that are useful to the people following you. A rough weekly mix for a local or regional business looks like this.

Make the offers trackable. A coupon code that only exists on Twitter tells you exactly how many customers came from it. Dell has publicly credited its @DellOutlet account with several million dollars in sales using exactly this method; a hardware store can do the same at a smaller scale.

Shorten every link with bit.ly. It gives you click counts per link for free, which is the single most useful measurement you have.

Ask questions. "What's the one thing you wish your accountant explained better?" gets replies. Announcements do not.

Retweet your customers and local peers. It costs nothing and it is how the follower graph grows.

Things to avoid: auto-DMs to new followers, auto-posting your entire RSS feed, tweeting the same message five times a day, and following thousands of accounts hoping for follow-backs. All four get you muted or reported.

Three to five tweets a day, spaced out, is the right range for almost every business. Post during your customers' working hours in their time zone, not at 11pm when you finally have a minute. If you serve the whole country, the 9am to 11am and 1pm to 3pm Eastern windows reach the most people.

Schedule where it helps. HootSuite and CoTweet let you queue tweets in advance, which solves the "nothing posted for nine days" problem. Keep at least one real-time slot a day for replies, because a scheduled account that never answers is obvious.

Reply within a business day, and within an hour to a complaint if you can. Speed is the whole point of the channel.

• TweetDeck or HootSuite to watch several columns at once: mentions, direct messages, a search for your business name, a search for your city plus your category.
• Twitter Search (search.twitter.com) with saved searches for your brand, common misspellings, and competitor names. Check it twice a day.
• bit.ly for link shortening and click counts.
• Twitter lists to group local media, suppliers, and best customers so you actually see their tweets.
• Google Alerts as a backstop for mentions that travel beyond Twitter.
• Google Analytics with campaign tags on your links so Twitter visits show up as their own source.

Paid monitoring (Radian6, Scout Labs) runs from several hundred to a few thousand dollars a month. For most businesses under a few hundred mentions a month, the free stack above is enough.

Follower count is the number everyone quotes and the least useful one. Track these instead, weekly, in a spreadsheet.

1. Clicks per link from bit.ly, and which kinds of tweets earn them.
2. Visits and goal completions from Twitter in Google Analytics, using tagged links so they are not lumped into referrals.
3. Redemptions of Twitter-only codes, counted at the register or in the shopping cart.
4. Mentions and replies per week, split into positive, neutral and complaint. Note how fast you answered.
5. Leads you can trace to a conversation. Keep a simple log: handle, date, what happened.

After eight weeks you will know whether the channel sends people who buy. If clicks are healthy but nothing converts, the landing pages are the problem, not Twitter. If nobody clicks, the tweets are the problem.

Treating it as a broadcast channel. The businesses getting results answer more than they announce.

Handing it to the youngest person in the office because they "get it." Give it to someone who knows the business and can be trusted to speak for it.

No policy. Write half a page: what we never discuss (customer details, legal matters, competitors by name), who approves offers, how we handle an angry customer (take it to DM or phone, never argue in public).

Buying followers or using follow-back schemes. The accounts are bots, the numbers mean nothing, and Twitter is suspending accounts that do it.

Quitting after a month. It takes a quarter to build a following that responds. Set the expectation up front.

We start with discovery: who your customers are, where they already talk about you, and what you can honestly commit to posting every week. From there we plan the voice, the content mix, the escalation rules and the measurement sheet. We build the account properly, set up the monitoring columns and tagged links, and train the people who will run it. Then we improve month by month from the numbers, because the brand, the website the tweets send people to, and the tracking behind it have to work as one system. Our social media management and digital strategy teams handle it together.

In a representative content engagement, a regional service business came to us with a dormant account, a logo-less avatar and a habit of posting press releases. We rebuilt the profile, set a three-a-day rhythm mixing seasonal tips with staff photos and one tracked offer a week, and set up saved searches for the city plus category. Within a quarter the account was fielding service requests directly in replies, and the tracked codes gave the owner a weekly number he trusted.