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Posts Tagged ‘Enterprise’

Corporate Twitter Toolbox: Twitter Tools for the Enterprise
Transcript From Episode CMSW2009-08-24

Mashable has the corporate Twitter Toolbox. From tweeting and responding to customers to tracking the conversation and measuring the effectiveness of Twitter campaigns, there is a bevy of great tools out there for corporate tweeters.

Finding the right Twitter applications is a challenge for social media managers, though, because new apps seem to spring up each day and they often have overlapping feature sets. Sudha Jamthe, Social Platform Strategist for PayPal X Platform advises companies on innovation and building engaging communities, and she says Twitter is a great listening post for companies to monitor conversations related to their brand and engage with customers. She delivers an extensive report on the market leaders in the different categories of tools available to manage a corporate social media campaign.

First, she advises marketers to use the Forrester Profile Calculator to find out where your customers are before you start pouring resources into a strong Twitter presence. The technographic profile shows how many of your customers generate original content through blogs and tweets, and how many mostly just read available content. Radian6 and Techrigy’s SM2 help to further categorize your customers by the specific social media tools that they use and find out where and if they are listening or posting.

Once you have a strategy, tools like Hootsuite and CoTweet help you execute. Companies like Disney, Dell and FOX use Hootsuite, a web-based Twitter client that supports multiple tweeters from one corporate Twitter account. In-depth reporting is available for each tweet and is a very valuable feature for a corporate social media campaign.

CoTweet also offers integrated Bit.ly reporting as well as multi-user and multi-profile support, and is used by Jet Blue, Sun Microsystems, Starbucks, Whole Foods, and even Twitter itself. TweetDeck and Seesmic are the two most popular desktop clients for enterprise use. Both are robust solutions with multi-profile support but not multi-user support, so work well for a solo community manager. iPhone solutions include Twittelator and Tweetie, both supporting multiple profiles.

The final step is tracking the conversations around your brand. Twitter Search is sufficient for many companies that just want to follow the chatter. Twitter Grader tracks and measures the influence of individual tweeters. Twazzup and Twitturly are useful for tracking a hashtag campaign. And another set of tools is no doubt in development right now, so keep your eyes and ears open.

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