Using Twitter at scale

In three short years, we’ve witnessed the evolution of Twitter from a way to exchange “inconsequential information between friends” to a business communication tool with a US$1 billion valuation.

As Twitter’s user base has grown into the millions, companies have followed their consumers onto the service and started participating in conversations. You’re already familiar with companies like Comcast, JetBlue, and Best Buy, among the hundreds of companies with corporate Twitter accounts.

But many of these companies are starting to face the scalability issue; a single person can manage the communication channel to prove the concept, but moving beyond one person/purpose can be difficult. Companies, unlike individuals, need to think through participation strategies for channel migration, which requires process, culture, and technology support.

To that end, Dachis Group is pleased to be a part of CoTweet’s Enterprise Innovators Program. We will be working with forward-thinking brands to help capture value from their Twitter activity. These companies have started moving beyond the proof of concept stage and are starting to measure their efforts to better manage outcomes. If you are interested in participating, you can request an invite.

Some of the experience we’ll be bringing to the program comes from a project that we completed recently for a well-known B2C brand. The company has been using a combination of personal and corporate Twitter accounts on an ad-hoc basis for customer support, but needed to step back and formulate a strategy for making their efforts work at scale. In our research, we found that most businesses are still using home-grown approaches, which are near if not already at their limits. If your company could use some help with this issue, let me know.