Had a great conversation via Twitter that was spawned by Christian Knapp from Keystone Mountain.
He asked, "what do you think of reciprocating all followers or just
following key industry opinion leaders?" My response was the philosophy
we apply to the @vignettecorp account. We follow customers,
media/analyst, bloggers and people who have interesting things to say
about the market we serve. We find new followers who usually end up
being existing customers based on listening for key search phrases
relative to the markets we serve.
Mike Slone
chimed in with a great point that customer centric brands should follow
back because it does not send the right message back. He took it one
step farther and said that customer centricity starts with
understanding who your customers are and then demonstrating that you
care.
Does reciprocating make you more customer centric?
For
large brands who have tens of thousands of customers reciprocating is a
gesture that you may be listening. Following alone does not imply you
are listening. Listening means you are proactive by reaching out to those who make mention as well as reactive to complaints or questions. Following is passive, listening is active.
Take JetBlue
for example, they are following 119k people. It is more than a full
time job to monitor each and every tweet hoping something relevant for
you to act on. Unless you are conducting research to gain insight from
followers it is not an efficient use of time to read what would be 10's
of thousands tweets per day. This is where monitoring solutions like
Radian6 come in.
You can set up search phrases to monitor
several social networking and user generated content sites. These
search phrases can be set to trigger alerts for follow up. In the case
of a travel company you might want to know when someone has tweeted "On
my way to Keystone". This would allow you to personalize their trip in
real time and follow up with them after to make sure everything went
well. The possibilities here are endless.
When deciding on who
to follow it is important to go back to the purpose of the account and
what business goals it supports. The other important consideration is
the amount of time you can dedicate to taking action on the request
that will come from Twitter.
We all agreed that no matter who you choose to follow, customers are a must.
An article from
Following is passive, listening is active
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Content Marketing