How To Handle Multiple Users Within Your Company

March 16 2009, 5:03pm

by Lara Kulpa. Lara is the owner of Ginkgo Consulting, a web marketing and consulting firm. Follow her at @larakulpa. Reader Question: My company recently started a Twitter account and we chose to have 3 “tweeters” in order to spread workload, include separate areas of expertise, and just give it variety. Do you think that a twitter account should always be (or at least look like) one person? Right now we describe each person in our bio. - Sean Robbins (@saucony) As more and more businesses get into Twitter, this question is one that I’m sure many will struggle with. If the CEO of a company joins Twitter and decides to connect with people, that’s great. But the question is bound to come into a follower’s mind, “Is this really the CEO or is it someone acting on his/her behalf on Twitter?” But what if your company has different types of products or services, geared toward different types of users? In that case, yes, I think it’s a good idea for multiple “company” twitter accounts. Let’s use the time-tested “widget company” for an example: Widgetz is a company that manufactures, sells, and repairs widgets of many different kinds.

CEO of Widgetz should have a Twitter account to initially put a “face to the name”. The VP of manufacturing should also have a Twitter account. As should the VP of Sales. And also the VP of Marketing/Advertising. And definitely, the VP of the Repairs department too.

All five of these people bring different experiences with widgets to the table. They interact with the product differently, their day-to-day dealings with customers, suppliers, and retailers are entirely different. Therefore, they should be interacting with people differently, regardless if it’s on Twitter or not. In the case of @saucony, the people using the account are currently adding their names to the end of each tweet. With only 140 characters available, they’re using valuable real estate to say who it is that’s actually responding, upwards of 8 characters worth! Having separate accounts would alleviate this. The bottom line is that not only should multiple employees of a company be using Twitter, but they should have their own Twitter accounts. The “streaming” nature of Twitter makes it extremely difficult to have multiple people logging into one account to track follower questions or participate in a flow of discussion, without the follower being confused or unsure of exactly who he or she is talking to. Just make sure that you’re all together avoiding overly repetitive tweets (or too many RT’s) and make sure that you’re not using Twitter with each other when you should be using an IM service. Not that you can’t interact with each other on Twitter, but keep it to a reasonable level. Bonus Tip: Develop a Twitter landing page on your site that all the Twitter accounts link to in their profiles. There, you can explain the accounts and who’s behind them, all on one page. That’ll give you more chances to get visits to your site, and you may wind up encouraging followers to follow all members of your team on Twitter! © 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.

How To Handle Multiple Users Within Your Company

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