There’s been much debate over whether companies should outsource their Twitter accounts to their advertising and public relations agencies.  Discussions have largely focused on whether an outsider speaking on behalf of the company expresses authenticity and transparency.

That’s a good point, but here’s the real issue for companies to think about.  Approximately 80 percent of Twitter is about retweeting and having “conversations” with others.  Just 20 percent is about posting your own tweets. Your agency can probably do a fine job on that 20 percent. But are they trained and steeped in company issues enough to respond to the 80% of questions, complaints, and off-topic musings?  Probably not.

As Twitter goes mainstream now is the time for companies to create an enterprise strategy for Twitter, addressing such issues as:

• Own your name: Make sure your company has its Twitter domain, e.g., Twitter.com/yourname.  If you’re too late, you may have to get involved with name squatters. Here’s a helpful Wall St. Journal piece on the topic.
• What do customers want: Think about what your customers want to be able to do/get from your company on Twitter, and then create Twitter strategies to support those wants. Pay special attention to areas  like customer service, training, product news, areas where people are beginning to expect to be able to get help via Twitter.
• Managed by business functions vs. social media dept.: Rather than have a separate social media function managing Twitter, I highly recommend incorporating Twitter into  business functions.  Doing so makes sure that the  80 % “conversations” are staffed by he people who can provide the most helpful and valuable information, and that they support business objectives.
• Put an enterprise listening platform in place, with specialized keywords and accounts for each business area involved in social media.  Make sure the platform helps your people be responsive, e.g, storing answers to commonly asked questions, featuring flagging capabilities so you rate the urgency of the Tweet and know if someone is addressing it.
• Have escalation guidelines: Develop  guidelines on how emerging trends, positive and negative, will be escalated — what are the criteria, who in the company will be alerted to what within what time frame, and what kind of action should be taken and then noted in the system so others in the company know the issue is being addressed.
• Find the insights: Lastly, create a strategy for mining social media conversations about your company, industry and competitors to uncover insights that the business can act on. I’ve seen clients find ideas for new products, new customers, and new brand building programs.  This is a rich, rich market research opportunity that few companies are fully taking advantage of.

Remember the 80/20 rule

The  number of Tweets or Twitter followers does not help build a  brand or the business — especially if the Tweets are randomly pushing out information, or the company Twitter is  trying to follow as many people as possible. I know this sounds so obvious. But every day I hear about companies who are being advised by agencies to “hire someone (meaning the agency) and pump up their Twitter volume.”

Pushing out that 20 percent is easy to “pump up the volume.”  The real value of Twitter comes from the other 80 percent, where people are getting useful and responsive information from a company that they can trust.