Ask HN: How does Twitter help your company?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=553524

by selcouth • 17 years ago

13 19 17 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

selcouth4• 17 years ago

So I found this post on a new community site, and I'm honestly curious. I hear that companies HAVE to use it, that it is a GREAT way to talk with your clients and customers. But I've tried...and I don't get it.

You guys are a pretty tech savvy bunch - how do you use Twitter?

zazzle12343• 17 years ago

"Found?" Aren't you the co-founder of this Trogger thing? I feel astroturfed.

selcouth4• 17 years ago

Eep, I am sorry for that. Yep, I am on of the founders of the site, but not the writer of the post. I was working on the site when we made an announcement about Trogger to some of our SFbeta attendees, and "found" that post from a few days ago and saw it hadn't gotten many informative responses. Was hoping people here could help me out - since I do twitter for our sfbeta event.

Sorry to leave you with some nasty scabs there. :(

auston• 17 years ago

My favorite of company twitter usage is from Kogi (http://twitter.com/kogibbq) - They use it to tell people where their Korean BBQ Taco trucks are around L.A.

silencio• 17 years ago

I wish Alice (one of the people tweeting from that account) would stop capitalizing random letters in her sentences. Otherwise I agree, I love how they're using Twitter. It's really nice to see them update about delays and issues.

jrockway• 17 years ago

The real-time search makes it easy to find people to lay off.

colins_pride• 17 years ago

I wonder if that's why twitter search is one of the few useful sites that my big-company IT department doesn't block.

axod• 17 years ago

The search makes it easy to see when users are having issues with my webapp.

Of course that assumes Twitter is working itself at the time... which sometimes it's not.

njharman• 17 years ago

I work for the Austin American-Statesman news company in central Texas.

This is how our Internet Editor answered that question http://thequig.wordpress.com/2008/09/23/op-ed-how-the-states...

Here are the many twitter accounts our reporters use to distribute and collect news and information http://www.statesman.com/news/content/standing/twitter.html

The team I work for wrote a tool to aggregate/retweet tweets from our staff and "widgets" to display them on various pages of our websites. This is mostly used during major events such as SXSW, elections, or Longhorn Football games as a fast way to collect and publish news and tidbits from our staff in the field. And also, of course, to engage/serve the Twitter community with news and information.

In general Twitter is a communications tool. If your business benefits from communicating with its customers (not all do) then it can benefit from Twitter.

But, like all things, it takes effort and can be done "wrong". It, like all things, is not a silver bullet.

darwinw2• 17 years ago

I started to twitter a few weeks ago, and I was occasionaly posting links to promote my content, but when I check my google analytics, i hardly see any referal from twitter. So at the moment, i'm still unsure about how effective twitter is to my business.

johns• 17 years ago

A lot of people are using Twitter desktop or mobile clients which wouldn't pass a referrer. Have your direct accesses gone up?

Also, just posting links to promote your stuff is a really ineffective way to promote your stuff on Twitter. Twitter is about the conversations, not the broadcasts. Engage in some meaningful conversations related to what you're trying to promote and you'll see the benefits.

darwinw2• 17 years ago

You made a good point, I saw increase in direct acesses but I need to find some ways to know that my effort spent on twitter produces that. Maybe url shortener like bit.ly can help in that regards.

callmeed• 17 years ago

We've started posting announcements, conversation starters and small contests on our company twitter account (I've been doing it on my personal account a little longer).

It's still early, but I think it's a promising way to get the word out on stuff and start conversations. When we release new site designs or app features, it's another way (besides our blog) to get the word out.

Also, another strategy is to use the search feature and find people looking for product recommendations (this happens more than you think).

Search is also good for finding people who are frustrated with your customer service–or your competitor's.

Zev• 17 years ago

Not really a company, but an open source project I contribute to (there's also an App Store app, so it might qualify as a company, I suppose) has a twitter account that we use. We mostly have a few twitter searches for anyone having problems with the app (Colloquy) or looking for an IRC client on a platform we support to recommend to them. Occasionally we'll give out promo codes, either to bloggers or to anyone following us/twitter's public stream to use.

Note, for this, we don't use a bot — A. because traffic is low volume, only a few tweets every few days and B. (imo), bots that send send the same message to everyone regardless of what the query is, is obnoxious.

Ask HN: How does Twitter help your company?

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