Twitter and PR

Twitter is so commonly used in public relations sector to help organizations raise awareness of their brands and  communicate with their target audiences in time.  In this blog post, I will talk about some uses of Twitter in public relations and suggest  what organizations should do in terms of ensuring a successful Twitter PR.

1 - One -way Communication or two - way Communication?
Both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton set up Twitter pages. Obama has more than 6 million followers whereas Hillary has only less than 20 thousand. The reason why Obama is more popular than Hillary on Twitter, despite the fact that one is the president and one is the secretary of the state, Obama interacts with his followers from time to time and gives feedback - my friend was followed by Obama on Twitter and he was so excited! On the other hand, Hillary Clinton follows zero people and never interact with her audiences. From this case, we can learn that it is a bad idea that organization set up a twitter page just giving out information without receiving any. This kind of one way communication is doomed to fail.

2 - Customers Service
When a man called Jonathan Fields tweeted some doubts about American airline JetBlue, a few minutes later, he soon got the feedback from JetBlue, and solved the problem. JetBlue uses twitter as a monitor and tracking tool to answer customer' s queries in real time and also keep customer updated about the flight information and all relevant news. Using Twitter to solve customers' problem, to a great extent, shortens the response time for organizations and  it is much cheaper than using traditional customer service.

                                                            3 - Evaluation and monitor tool

Twitter helps a lot of organizations monitor comments made by customers about the brand, product or services. These voices of customers could help organization to get to know what they think, what they like, what needs improving and etc. Moreover, by monitoring organizations could sense whether crisis is going to happen and make early preparation for crisis.

4- Carry out PR campaign on Twitter
Taste live! once hold a PR campaign on Twitter. The company provided 5 different kinds of wine to people for free and chose a fixed date to discuss with people on Twitter how they feel about the wine. Don't even need a venue for wine tasting, people could share opinions without considering any constraints, such as location, and transportation etc. The company had a chance to have in-depth conversation with its customers and at the same time more potential customers were discovered through the influence of Twitter.

So the most important rule of using twitter in PR is to let your audiences know your existence and at the same time interact with them. Also, one last hint - don't tweet TOO much otherwise people would unfollow you!



Sources:  
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2587/3915512820_74a09a0254.jpg
http://www.katiebacon.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/twitter_bird.jpg
http://twitter.com/#!/BarackObama
 http://twitter.com/#!/HRClinton
 http://www.jonathanfields.com/blog/jetblue-twitter-customer-service-or-to-spy/#comment-3073