Google and Bing’s inclusion of real-time tweets in search results freaked out a lot of companies. And if only for its SEO value, many are now embracing the conversational web. But what’s easy to overlook is that real-time can mean ALL the time. So if your communications team is in NY, but you have customers in San Francisco, Tokyo and Mumbai, you’ll miss both opportunities and threats as the sun passes overhead.
Remember, the issue here isn’t so much the use of Twitter, which has been adopted unevenly around the world. It’s about the appearance of tweets in search results. If one person tweets something negative about the company, it could appear in thousands of searches.
But before you start hiring staff to tweet ’round the clock, take a moment to consider the options:
1. Is there a real need? There may not be enough mentions of your company overnight on Twitter to drive down your latest tweet from the day before. Particularly in B2B, where your most important search terms tend to be technical and the sales cycles are longer, it may be perfectly fine to let sleeping dogs…well…sleep.
2. Use AdWords to pick up the slack. If you know the negative stuff that other people may tweet, about a lawsuit, a recall, or a complaint you can predict, you can use AdWords to distribute PR-developed messages. These can be holding statements, refutations of rumors, even news articles that disprove claims. Here’s an article that goes deep into how to use AdWords for PR.
3. Use tweet-delaying tools. If you want to keep the Twitter segment of your audience’s search results fresh overnight, use Hootsuite or another time delayed tweeting tool to push out links to articles overnight. Don’t tweet a question that will generate responses…just push out useful information.
4. A threshold test + monitoring + phone. Not every comment needs a response. Especially in certain fields or situations, negativity will exist and persist. To deal with it, develop a threshold test to figure out if a certain comment requires an immediate response. Put monitoring staff in place, and if one of your designated trip wires is breached, have someone give you a ring.
