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Updated January 28, 2020In the early days of starting a business, a founder is often a multi-department team of one: engineering, design, marketing, and sales. It’s likely you also need to task yourself with customer service. Your users are often on Twitter, and that’s where they want to get help. That’s where you should provide it.
This serves to both get customers their answers, and to be aware of issues with your product or service and provide reassurance. When you initially start a company, this advice can be invaluable in helping you prioritize fixes and building your project roadmap.
If you’re fortunate enough to have your team grow, you’ll hire for a customer support team. Many companies have an “All hands customer support culture” that encourages C-levels and executives to be cognizant of customers by doing customer support. If your company does this, they likely have to be trained how best to provide support on Twitter. Users often tag founders or prominent employees with their questions (or complaints!) about new features or bugs.
Companies that succeed often have founders with their ear on the pulse of customer feedback:
Eric Yuan (@ericsyuan), the founder and CEO of Zoom, famously responded to user critique and extended support fixing user issues.
Mathilde Collin (@collinmathilde), the Co-Founder and CEO of Front, maintains an “everyone does support” ethos at her company, for herself included. She writes, “You will often find myself and my co-founder in the support queue or on Twitter answering customer questions directly. I know Patrick Collison at Stripe and Eoghan McCabe at Intercom do this as well.”
Great tools for providing social support on Twitter:
There are countless resources on how to use Twitter for marketing: growing your business through Twitter Ads, optimizing your tweet timing and frequency for improved visibility, and ideal sizing for graphics, to name a few (we won’t cover those here).
But what’s most important about using Twitter as a promotional channel for your business is the type of content you post. As a general rule: doing promotion well shouldn’t feel like promotion. That’s to say there really shouldn’t be a huge shift between a personal account and a brand account—both should aim to be interesting, informative, and adept at storytelling. Rather than selling, your company account should be helping, whether through original or curated content.
Here are three categories of social content that work: