Your Message Lacks Sincerity

For the past few months a number of companies have tried to get on the social media bandwagon. There have been scandals like the Domino's pizza scandal and many missteps along the way. One of the most important tools that you can have in Social Media is your personality. If you are insincere, it will come across in your message. People can tell if you are truly passionate about your subject matter.

Keeping the importance of online personality in mind, many companies choose to use a PR firm to manage their Social Media presence. For many, this is a bad idea. It is always best to have someone who knows and understands your products writing and responding to your followers. Along the same line of thought, some companies have decided that an Intern is the solution to this Social Media Craze. Unless you are including the Intern in your organization, this will not translate well. There is no incentive for the Intern to manage your information and their lack of initiative will translate into poor posts.

Each account should have one person who posts. If there are multiple people sharing the same Twitter handle, they need to have different signatures. Otherwise, there can be confusion resulting from multiple personalities being expressed from the same account. A good example of how to do this is @GuyKawasaki. His ghost writers are AC and LF. They simply post these initials at the end of the tweet so that you know who wrote it. Another successful attempt at differentiation that I have seen is a local company called DO512.com. On their twitter each employee has a separate accounts. An example of this is @Do512_Kristin

Finally I would suggest that you avoid the programs that allow you to automatically follow those who mention your brand. First off, it's just creepy that when you mention a company like OLPC that you are being followed the next day. More importantly is the fact that you cannot pay attention to all of the posts that would result from following so many people. To make your presence on Twitter more successful, you should only follow those people who are posting information relevant to you. Use tools like search.twitter.com to search for what people are saying about you instead of following them all.