Twitter Business Account
Twitter is a social media platform that spreads messages and news far and wide extremely fast. It could be a great place for your business to be, depending on who your target audience is. There are millions of users (330 million and counting!) on Twitter.
- Employee Accounts. In addition to establishing the main business account, you might want to allow employees to create business-related accounts as well. For example, if you own Widget Co. And your Twitter handle is @widgetco, an employee named Kate might have the handle @widgetcokate or something similar.
- Every platform has its own demographics, rules and styles, and knowing which platforms are right for your business is important. Let’s first consider the key demographics of Twitter users. The majority of users are teens and young adults up to 29 years old from urban or suburban areas.
Some companies put links to their Twitter account on their website and include their username on printed literature like business cards. Therefore, it’s important to choose something on-brand and easy to remember. With new accounts, Twitter automatically generates a username from the name provided earlier. Create a Twitter Account. To begin setting up your business page for Twitter, simply go to.
Whether you are new to Twitter and need to set up a fresh business Twitter account, or you already have a personal account that you want to switch to business, we’re here to guide you through the process! It can be daunting and, at times, confusing to start a new social media account, which is why we’re here.
If you have a personal account that you want to convert to a business account, skip below to the second step 3. If you are starting from scratch and need to create a brand new business Twitter account, start here:
Step 1: Sign Up
Head to Twitter to sign up from the home page.
Step 2: Give Twitter Your Name and Phone Number
Your name can either be your actual name or your business name. We recommend choosing your business name, since this name will be your handle or username (@yourbusinessname). You can always change this later through your account settings. Hint: Twitter might switch the first and last names when you sign up, so you’ll probably have to change your handle anyway! Twitter will also ask for your phone number, but you can opt to give them your email if you prefer.
After you give them your phone number or email, Twitter will send you an activation code to confirm that you are the one setting up the account.
Step 3: Go Through Prompts
There are several prompts that Twitter will guide you through, such as: your interests, suggestions of people to follow, and turning on your notifications. You can finish filling out that information now, or skip it and come back later.
Now that you’ve reached this point, skip ahead to step 3 below.
If you need to convert your personal Twitter account to one for your business, start here:
Sign Up For Twitter Account
If you have an existing Twitter account that you set up for yourself individually, you can easily update the information on it and use it for your business. All Twitter profiles have the same functionality, but if you’re interested in turning your personal Twitter account into a business Twitter account, there are a few things to consider. The biggest benefit of switching from personal to business is having the capability to keep your existing followers. This is ideal for folks who already have a lot of followers. Here are some easy, key steps you need to take when converting your profile:
Step 1: Log In
Didn’t we tell you it would be easy? Logging in is the first step.
Step 2: Switch Your Username to Your Business Name
Once you’re logged in, click on the circle icon with your profile picture in the top right-hand corner. From there, click on “settings and privacy.” This will lead you to a page that allows you to change your username, designated email address, business location, and more.
When choosing a Twitter handle for your business, be sure to include as much of the name as possible. If your business name is already taken on Twitter, keep it simple. We abbreviated ours to @AspenGroveMktg since Twitter limits handles to 15 characters.
Step 3: Edit The Details
Now it’s time to go to your profile and update the important things people will see when they head to your page. Simply go to your profile and click “edit profile” on the right side of the screen to start making changes.
Start off by changing your profile picture to a logo, professional headshot, or even your business’s building. Keep it all relative to the business – meaning, if you are the face of the business, then it’s totally appropriate to keep your profile picture from your personal account, as long as it’s professional.
Go ahead and change any other information that you want people to know about your business in your bio. Don’t forget to set a header photo, add your birthday (or the date your business started), your location, website, and theme color. You can keep your Twitter name consistent with your handle to keep things simple and straightforward for your visitors.
Step 4: Start Advertising
Now that your Twitter business account is all set up, it’s time to start advertising!
Of course, if you haven’t posted anything relating to your business yet, this would be the time to do so. Go ahead and write a few tweets, find photos to go with them, and send them out. Unlike other social media platforms, on Twitter it is acceptable to tweet 3-6 times per day.
Once you’ve sent out a few tweets, you can start promoting them. Click on the circle icon in the upper right corner again – that will open the drop-down menu, and click on “Twitter Ads.” From there, Twitter will guide you through a series of steps to choose what kind of advertising you want to do and why.
If you’re having trouble figuring out how to set up your Twitter ads and campaigns, let us know. We’re happy to sit down with you at a one-on-one consultation and help you get set up and running.
Twitter is still a major player in the game of social media, so we hope you take this advice and run with it! Creating a business Twitter account is so easy and seamless that anyone with a Twitter account could do it. If you’re not sure about Twitter for your business, read this blog or contact us today to learn more. We can show you real-life examples of how Twitter generates leads and drives traffic to small companies’ websites. If you have any questions or concerns about social media or digital marketing in general, we are here for you. Join the social media party today and leverage its power to grow your business!
Corporate tweeters need to know that they aren’t just promoting a brand or solving a problem: they are performing for an audience, supporting customers throughout their journey, and even, subtly, selling. The best, like American Airlines, make it feel natural. They have given their social media staff a clear mission and a great deal of autonomy; the account’s managers chat with customers, offer up front to solve problems, and empathize with frustrated travelers.
But the worst have exported their old tricks to new media. Entirely devoid of empathy, their accounts might as well be run by robots. Starbucks simply redirects queries to an email address—with a grating exclamation point to add insult to injury. At least that’s better than the 70% of companies that plainly ignore complaints on Twitter.
This matters. Social media isn’t merely a place for people to chat with each other and for brands to talk at their customers. For a new generation of consumers who get their news and form their views about the world primarily on social media, it is an essential proving ground. A witty comment or botched response on Twitter can travel to Facebook and even news websites in minutes (think of the Oreo tweet during the Superbowl blackout of 2013). But a single miscalculated remark can cascade into an avalanche of disapproval, a phenomenon Jon Ronson explores his new book, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. It has never been as easy and as quick for reputations to be made and destroyed.
Twitter Business Account Cost
Yet, despite the urgency of getting it right—and the ample time that companies have had to figure it out—most corporations have an empathy deficit. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. After all, management exists to transform corporations into more efficient machines. But in the process, little attention is paid to the humanity of either customers or employees. Efficiencies are made the expense of humanity. That limits the ability of companies to engage authentically and emotionally with their customers.
Measuring empathy
Thanks to easy access to data sets, advanced data analysis techniques, and the very public nature of social networks, we are able to look at how companies listed on the major London and New York stock exchanges communicate with their customers as a way to gauge which are the best and worst at displaying empathy.
We used Twitter, which has the benefit of being the most transparent big social network today. It also encourages back-and-forth conversation, unlike Facebook which tends to be a broadcasting medium. Moreover, Twitter is used by virtually all big Western companies either for marketing or to respond to customers—and sometimes both.
How do you measure empathy on social media? In our view, empathy consists of three components: reassurance, authenticity, and emotional connection. Empathy goes beyond simply solving a problem. It involves making a customer feel valued.
These qualities are quantifiable. While data analysis cannot tell us whether an individual tweet displays empathy, it can look in aggregate at how Twitter is being used by a firm and identify certain patterns of behavior in interactions between companies and their followers, and infer a degree of engagement. We analyzed 350,000 tweets across 300 companies. Unencumbered by an individual’s perception of a brand, automated analysis has the benefit of being fairer and more objective.
We identified specific empathic and unempathic behavior, and scored companies accordingly. Highly empathic tweeters, for example, avoid using repetitious stock phrases. They also interact with users. They don’t use twitter as a broadcasting service for promotion or investor announcements. The worst offenders not only repeat stock phrases but also divert users to other non-social channels (e.g. call centers).
Empathic tweeters are gender neutral or reflect the gender of their audience. We supplemented our model by using an algorithm and dataset developed by University of Pennsylvania to identify the apparent gender of our subjects and their followers. The algorithm is able to infer gender based on language. The energy, finance, and technology sectors tend to tweet using a male-biased tone of voice. Retail and consumer goods tend to use more female language in their social communication.
We found that the top-performing companies use gender-neutral language or a slightly female tone of voice. Wal-mart, for example, employs an empathic female tone, using evocative language and emotional ways of responding using emoticons. On the other hand, many of the least empathic companies defaulted to an excessively male tone, one that was often indifferent to the gender of their audience. Hewlett Packard demonstrated a very male tone of voice providing very little emotional connection with customers.
This shouldn’t be surprising. Women respond well to empathy and expect brands to be more empathic. Women are also the dominant users of nearly every social media service, including Facebook and Twitter. Women account for 62% of Twitter users, visiting 40 million times more than men do each month. On Facebook, women account for 58% of users, posting an average of 394 updates per year compared to 254 from men.
They aren’t anonymous. Empathic companies named the tweeters working on their behalf and allowed them to show their individual personality and humor. Unempathic companies, on the other hand, often used anonymous tweeters, who often repeating press release headlines or corporate talking points.
They use a single Twitter account to represent the organization. A third of the companies in our study have separate accounts for customer service and marketing. That reflects the needs of the company: different departments with their own budgets running accounts for different purposes. But it does not show empathy for the chaotic and diverse needs of customers.
A loyal customer who likes and follows a brand for engagement today may need technical support tomorrow. She is unlikely to go looking for the support account. Siloing accounts limits the range of interactions between company and customers. It forces customers to learn company hierarchies and department. These divisions reflect the organization’s needs, not the customer’s. The problem is also that greater resources are being provided to the care accounts than to the overall corporate Twitter accounts.
American Airlines again provides a good example. The main account promotes the brand and responds to customer queries with equal skill. Sometimes, a separation can work if the support account is lively and well resourced. Another good example, @MicrosoftHelps, is an active broadcaster but also a sensitive responder, replying to queries in a casual, friendly, and helpful tone. The individuals who run it are clearly experts—and they have personality too.
Another striking, if not entirely surprising, conclusion from our survey is that consumer-facing firms tend to be better at displaying empathy than their business-to-business counterparts. In technology, household names such as Facebook, Microsoft, and Intel are at the top of the class while the worst performers in the sector are mainly in enterprise technology, storage, hardware and research. Similarly, in finance, payment providers and investment banks such as Schroders and Goldmans Sachs Group fared badly while retail insurance and banking such as PNC Financial Services Group performed well.
Twitter Business Account Multiple Users
Companies of all stripes must understand that empathy isn’t just about customer support. It is also about how companies relate to their employees and to the world at large. Social media is merely the most public and obvious means to measure it. We have come a long way from the era of unconcerned shop assistants and unaccountable call-center workers.