Do companies use Twitter?

tdean

if so, what benefit would that be? i got an email about a job with a dr's office. they want someone to "increase their social network presence" including twitter. personally, i cant imagine why anyone would want to know what someone is doing 24/7, but is that used for any legitimate purposes?

chmorin

Because I totally follow my dr's office on twitter.

Honestly, enough said. No, won't catch on. If it is another type of business, more potential is there.

tdean

chmorin wrote: »

Because I totally follow my dr's office on twitter.

Honestly, enough said. No, won't catch on. If it is another type of business, more potential is there.

i would think with all the HIPAA requirements, twitter would be a waste for anything like that. i could kind of see a facebook page if they wanted to talk about their practice and get patients/customers to "friend" or "like" them.... i still dont really see the benefit of that.... or any social networking for that matter. seems like kid stuff to me. terribly time consuming and very little benefit in return.

Devilsbane

Lots of businesses do it. They have groups on facebook. They send out promotions and other stuff to attract business. They usually do some givaways too.

But for a DR. office? idk

tdean

yeah, heres a quote from the email...

"-Manage our internet presence including search optimization, social networking presence, Twitter, Facebook etc. "

the first part would depend on who's hosting and the meta tags used when the site was built, right? well, assuming they are registered with google etc....

tdean

"Honey, whats wrong?"

"Dr Roberts just Tweeted the test results came back and i have 6 months to live."

Paul Boz

So much negativity...

I can think of a huge number of possible tweets a doctor's office may send out.

"Come get your flu shots before its too late!"

"this month is cancer awareness month, get your checkups"

"ABC Doctor's office now has a new fitness and wellness program on Wednesdays"

"ABC Doctor's office is proud to introduce our newest doctor ________"

etc.

colemic

I can't find it, but someone track down the story from a few weeks ago, I think it was in NY, a supermarket shopper made a negative tweet about a specific grocery store, and media specialist/PR-type person for the supermarket responded back to them, then emailed their job site/boss wanting to get them fired.

Forsaken_GA

I know that when The Planet had a fire in their Houston datacenter a couple years back, they were pretty much totally knocked offline and used their Twitter feed to keep folks updated

colemic

I remember that too!

...although I have no idea why, but I remember following it pretty closely.

ziggi138

I work for Zappos.com and the CEO tweets often. We are a very transparent company, and all employees are encouraged to tweet. you can check out twitter.zappos.com and see that there a ton of employees and executives that tweet.

msteinhilber

Some companies have legitimate uses for Twitter. Well, I should rephrase - some companies have things Twitter can be used for to enhance the customers overall experience if said customer uses Twitter or other social mediums the business might utilize to provide something meaningful to the customer.

A lot of companies are also really hearing a lot about social media from a lot of places. It's in the media, it's something they hear their employee's talk about and probably a number of them say "hey we should be on there!", it's something marketing people look to get into as they hear about it being the next big thing from others in their field as well as through countless mailers about social media marketing classes being offered.

Our organization (real estate company) has made a heavy push to utilize all of the popular social media sites out there both as an organization as well as for our money makers (our agents) to use personally. They hope agents will connect with friends and family and get their name out there to friends of their friends and so on with hopes of when the agent makes a post perhaps about a property they just sold or just helped someone buy that someone somewhere along their network notices it and keeps them or my company in mind if they need to buy/sell a home.

Forsaken_GA wrote: »

I know that when The Planet had a fire in their Houston datacenter a couple years back, they were pretty much totally knocked offline and used their Twitter feed to keep folks updated

This is a solid use of Twitter as well and one some companies could learn to use. It's a way Twitter can be used which would have been very welcomed by myself as a customer of Steadfast Networks back in September when a transition of a couple core routers over to Brocade equipment went awful to say the least. Ultimately left my servers down for essentially a full day plus some while any form of updates was pretty much non existent except for conflicting reports from a couple staff members posting on WHT which is difficult enough to even locate the updates between dozens of posts from angry customers. And in this case, they have a Twitter account but simply didn't use it