Marketing with Mike Volpe

This is a guest post by Marijo Tinlin, who is the principal at Sunrise Business Consulting (@SunriseBusiness) which helps small and emerging businesses and entrepreneurs get traction in business, sales and marketing. Her specialities include all facets of marketing including inbound marketing, content marketing, database marketing and search engine optimization.

Just as you may have a personal Twitter account and one for your business, you may want to separate the Twitter feeds for your company to specifically address certain parts of your business.

This could mean that you separate out the Customer Feedback feed from the Company News feed. Or if you are a technology company, you might want a Tech Support feed so your corporate feed doesn't need to address technical issues.

There are several advantages to this:

1. You can serve different audiences easily, by interest or by geography (include foreign offices)
2. Your readers can set up mobile notices for just the information they want from you
3. You can help your search engine rankings by the sheer volume of your brand being out there because the search engines search Twitter in real time. Here's a link to an example of how this works from Andy Beard @AndyBeard .

Zappos is a perfect example of addressing different customer and employee needs through different Twitter feeds. There are almost too many to list here but besides CEO Tony Hsieh's famous feed on @zappos, they also tweet for the following:

• Inside Zappos @inside_zappos
• Zappos Help Desk @zappos_helpdesk
• Zappos Service @Zappos_Service
• Zappos Pipleline @Zappos_Pipeline
• Zappos Tweetup @Zappos_Tweetup
• Zappos Kids Team @Zappos_KidsTeam

In addition, specific employees tweet as well, including the COO. So you can see they get granular about how they address the needs of customers and employees.

Keep in mind that once you have a customer service Twitter feed, everyone who follows that feed can see the back-and-forth conversations you are having with your customers. In the new paradigm of real-time customer feedback, as a company, you must be prepared for what you'll see and use this feedback to get better, not defensive! Happy Tweeting.