How Many Twitter Handles?

A question that comes up quite frequently, from companies of all sizes and stripes, is “How many Twitter handles should we have?”

I first answer the question with a question of my own: “Do you have a centralized or distributed approach to Social Media engagement, i.e., is engagement handled by a core group of (typically) marketing folks, or, are a sizable proportion of employees allowed to tweet and blog?” Because the answer to that question changes my counsel.

(Side bar: these and other approaches are discussed at length in the post, “Social Media in Corporations: Pros & Cons of Organizational Models”)

If your company has a distributed approach, i.e., if the horse has already left the barn, you’ll have a tough time consolidating things and it’s time to create (or conduct an annual review of) your Social Media Policy Guidelines. Because really, it’s perfectly fine to have scores of your staffers on Twitter, so long as they understand that they are representatives of the corporation, which bring certain expectations of conduct. Ya never know who will rise up from the employee pool as a Social Media star.

For those companies with a more central approach, it actually is a tougher question. As noted in a recent post about “Social Media & The Sales Team,” marketers often come up against big-time pressure from salespeople to turn Twitter into a sales channel. There’s often a tricky balance required: how much of the outreach is “engagement for its own sake” vs. engagement to motivate sales and “ROI?”

Luckily, it’s that issue in particular that forms the basis of my answer to the “How many Twitter handles should we have?” question.

First off, short answer: I believe 90% of companies would be best served with ONE Twitter handle.

Why diffuse your message? If you have a centralized approach to Social Media (i.e., it’s controlled by a small group), make this handle your hub. After all, there are no hard-and-fast rules about what you tweet about: sometimes it can be about a deal-of-the-day, sometimes industry news, sometimes it’s your own news — and in any case, ~80% of the time it ought to be retweets of other people’s cool content.

It only takes one Twitter handle to spread awesomeness.

However, if your official tweetstream is being polluted by too many deals, offers, and incentives (i.e., “sales stuff”), ultimately you’re going to turn-off people who are interested in your brand as a community member. So, if deals and promotions are important to the company’s approach, THEN I think it’s perfectly reasonable to crank up a sales-oriented Twitter handle, to supplement the “engagement” handle vs. taking it hostage.

Keep it simple. Don’t dilute your messages nor make it hard for people to find you. Be findable and personable and simple. Success with this Social Media stuff is often as much about simplicity and energy as it is about strategy.

Continue reading here: New Corporate Blogger is Born

Was this article helpful?