Don’t worry about having too many tweets to deal with.

Home Don’t worry about having too many tweets to deal with.

One of the major excuses for brands to avoid participation on Twitter is their fear of having too much additional work. “We won’t be able to deal with the enormous flow of tweets and feedback from clientsâ€, is what I hear a few times a week.

For some major brands, this is probably true. That’s why companies like Dell, Gatorade, Delta Airlines, Best Buy and many other global brands are re-organizing their service and communication department. Without this structural change, they wouldn’t be able to handle all the interactions with consumers.

However, for most brands, the number of tweets is rather limited. I recently did the test for a big Belgian company. And we discovered that over a time span of 12 months, they should have replied to about 2000 tweets, which means about 10 times a day. My guess is that this could take up to 15-30 minutes a day if somebody grabs this responsibility. I would assume that this is still within the possibilities of a big company, don’t you agree. Reality: the company spends hours of meetings talking about the fact that they don’t have enough resources to answer all the tweets.During all these wastedmeeting hours they could probably have replied to thousands of requests from their audience.

For me, the main concern should NOT be: “we will have too many interactions and questions to deal with”. Most companies should worry about the fact that there are not enough people interacting with them. In fact, if a big company only needs to replyto 2000 tweets over a period of a year, thanit sounds like the level of brand engagement and interaction is pretty low. The number of tweets tells you something about being top of mind, being interesting enough to be talked about.

My advice is:

  • – Stop having meetings in which you say that you don’t have time to manage your brand on Twitter, just do it during that time.
  • – Stop worrying about having too many tweets, but think about how you can increase the number of positive conversations about your brand.