| 10 Jul 2009 - The Business of Twitter - For anyone |
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| Early in May this year I signed up for a private trial of CoTweet (http://www.cotweet.com) to see how 'business' was doing twitter. I have a couple of twitter accounts which I'm working on as support or business ventures, and the premise behind managing them is to get messages out regularly and planned into the future, as well as good customer service. My needs are nothing compared to huge American companies like JetBlue Airlines, Sprint Mobile, Ford, Microsoft and Coke!. Simple review - outstanding. CoTweet is a website, which once logged in shows you all the messages you've received in your account and allows you to reply to them. Wow you're thinking, that's - amazing - Not really. Twitter.com does that! So what does it do over and above. It's all about interaction with your audience or your customers, as well as managing multiple accounts. Some of the key features I've used or noticed: 1/ Multiple Accounts - manage incoming and outgoing tweets for multiple accounts without logging in or out - Currently 4 accounts available in the Free Beta. 2/ Scheduled Tweets - when Posting a message you can choose which account to post from, and also when to send the post - either immediately or at a set date and time 3/ Multiple users - setup logins for various customer service staff, allowing them to access specific twitter accounts or multiple accounts 4/ User Status - your customer service staff can be shown as 'on duty' or not which ensures they get alerts on email about new messages needing attention. This allows you to funnel the 'new tweet' alerts to the people who are sitting at their desks ready to deal with the enquiry. 5/ Assign individual messages to certain users - allowing you to have a specialist in one area dealing with certain enquiries. The messages are tagged to the user, an alert is sent by email and a note attatched to the message. 6/ User profiles - view follower/user info within the single screen, including profile (follow/unfollow), Updates (see their recent tweets), Conversations (view conversations between you and the user across all your twitter accounts) and Notes (make notes about users which are visable whenever you interact with them) 7/ CoTags - These are mini signatures which each of your staff can have (their Initials basically) which are added to the end of the outgoing messages to personalise the service, making people realise there is a real person behind the messages they are receiving This is by no means a comprehensive list of all the features, however what it does show is the main points of interest. I know many companies think they are 'on top' of twitter, sending messages here and there - but it's being managed in a way that is not scalable. While Seesmic, or Tweetdeck can do many of these things, what they lack is integration across an entire customer service team. Using CoTweet multiple staff can see that items have been responded to, or view recent conversations, or assign tweets to each other. This is where productivity will be improved and CoTweet may just have hit the right spot to corner the market for large corporation tweeting. If you are a business - Sign up, you're crazy not to give it a try. If you're a big business, you can't sit on the sideline any more, this has to be part of your strategy. Would love to hear anyone's thoughts if you sign up, or are a current user. |
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