Can Twitter Help Maintain Your Brand Reputation?

Why does Twitter make a difference to your brand? More consumers frequent social network sites everyday to opine about products and/or services used in their everyday life. Monitoring those opinions and the subsequent conversations about your brand has become critical to the maintenance of your online brand reputation. If you need an online tool to help you follow your existing and prospective customers, Twitter is one of the most effective tools for your internet brand management.

Twitter now has over 1 million users. So, many companies are monitoring their online brand reputation via Twitter due to the widespread usage among the consumers today. Just imagine the number of conversations that could be happening about your product or service – your customers log on to Twitter everyday expressing their opinions and relating their experiences about your products and services. Whether they talk about you or your competitors, you must leverage those conversations in your social media marketing plan. Most tools to manage your online brand reputation are not as simple as by just entering your brand name into a search box. With Twitter, you can easily keep track of the views and feedback of your customers in real-time.

Twitter makes it easy to use. Create a username by your brand name and not by your personal name, if your tweets will be a micro-blog of company activities. Here are two powerful tools that you can leverage to control your brand management online:

Search.twitter.com – Use this powerful search box to get the updates of the conversations in real-time. Type in your brand name and find out what people are saying. Don’t forget to monitor your competitors too.

Tweetscan.com – Tweetscan allows you to set up a personalized system that can alert you via email if anyone Tweets about your company or brand.

Why do so many companies put so much emphasis on managing their brand on Twitter? Because Twitter has become increasingly ubiquitous; widget-savvy Twitterers send and receive up to the minute tweets via cell phone, Tweetdeck or Twhirl. Hence, it is not surprising to find people tweet about the brands they are associated with whenever and wherever they feel like – it can go on 24/7 and spread like wildfire. Therefore, it is important for you to keep on an eye on the conversations about your brand on Twitter.

But internet brand management is not only about monitoring the feedback of the customers. It is also about listening and participating in the conversations. Since Twitter allows you to engage the customer immediately, you can share the updates with your customers or inform them of any potential developments about your company. This way you can keep them engaged with your brand in real-time. In short, Twitter is a free tool for corporate internet branding and public relations.