How can Twitter impact the corporate image and reputation of a company?

Twitter is a great business tool but there can be some risks.

In today’s fast-paced business environment, having a social media presence is now an essential part of an organisation’s marketing strategy. Social media enables a company to achieve business growth, increase customer engagement while developing and strengthening relationships.

Going digital

Marketing has evolved dramatically from the modern 1960’s 4 P’s theory (Price, Product, Promotion and Place) to the post-modern digital marketing era. As internet speed continuously increases, the number of internet users increases in alignment. It is estimated that the majority of world’s population will be participating in any one of the social networks by 2025!

It is reported that 87% of marketers believe that the goal of social media is to increase brand awareness with 56% of executives stating that digital engagement with customers is at least a top ten company priority. Social media platform Twitter has over 313 million monthly active users, and over 500 million tweets are sent each day. Therefore, for businesses, the use of social media as a marketing tool has undeniable potential.

Why Twitter?

Twitter offers countless opportunities for businesses to reach a global audience of current and potential customers. Twitter is one of the most extensively used social media platforms in business and is used so much that approximately 73% of these businesses use the social media platform to communicate with their followers.

Twitter can be regarded as primarily a consumption channel, where 86 percent of users use it for business activities and reading other’s tweets. 58 percent of Twitter users have retweeted what they have read, 55 percent of users have posted a tweet, 54 percent have responded to a tweet, and 42 percent have sought support for a product. A user of Twitter follows other users therefore subscribing to the messages that they share.

Through the use of hashtags, social users can declare their interests and participate in topical discussions. As individuals and companies become influential on social media, they can use Twitter to share their message and have their message shared to a vast number of people. Each member of an online, social network has the ability to exchange information with other social users, ask questions and provide solutions to and from different locations across the world instantaneously. As individuals become more influential and the speed of exchanging messages increases on social media, it is important to consider the corporate image and reputation of a company in this digital age.

What is corporate reputation?

Corporate reputation can be seen as multi-faced as things can be perceived in different ways at different times by different people, thus there is a need to look at reputation drivers to consider the issues concerning stakeholders and to assign them to the relevant group. Should a stakeholder be dissatisfied by one or more of the reputation drivers, they may take to Twitter to express their feelings thus damaging the reputation of a company.

Social media tracking and the various monitoring tools available allows for an organisation to respond to accusations or misinterpreted communication via a twenty-four seven media platform. It is argued that social media messages should always be responded to and, when possible, within the hour. Therefore, controlling social media messages allows for successful symmetrical communication between the company and the stakeholder and for a successful corporate image and reputation management.

Our expertise

If you are looking for some help in making the most of your social media channels, get in touch with us today and let’s get digital working for you.