Tessa Barrera

Twitter 101 with Kanye West

When Mariah had her Glitter breakdown, she went on TRL. When Kanye had his, he went on Twitter. That’s right, the infamous rapper just unleashed a total of 84 tweets within 90 minutes. Paris Hilton, he ain’t. This wasn’t a planned marketing exercise, it was either a man trying to take PR into his own hands, a mental breakdown, or someone hacking his account.

They wanted yall to believe I was a monster in real life so you guys wouldn’t listen or buy my music anymore

Man I love Twitter… I’ve always been at the mercy of the press but no more… The media tried to demonize me

How deep is the scar… I bled hard.. cancelled tour with the number one pop star in the world … closed the doors of my clothing office

With the help of strong will, a lack of impathy, a lil alcohol and extremely distasteful & bad timing … I became George Bush over night

Ranging from Taylor Swift, to the George Bush Telethon incident, to even having to fire employees, Kanye West just blubbered his whole emotional scope on Twitter, not even pausing for any possible carpal tunnel effects.

Dude, get a grip. Even if you didn’t read the content, looking at the number of tweets in the short time span shows some sort of manic grasp for reality or acceptance.

Marketers take note. Don’t be Kanye. As a celebrity, this kind of stuff is awesome to watch. We want our celebrities to break down publicly in such dramatic blazes of glory. As a brand, you don’t.

For any brand feed, the number one question I get asked is how many tweets should we do daily? The response is always the same, it depends on the brand, message and type of tweet, but there should never be more than one content tweet per hour unless we’re in a major push. The reason, just look at Kanye. This stuff is cluttering people’s news feeds and becoming more of a turn-off as they scan to see other news or promotions. You want to be a reminder in their news stream, but not the annoying kid next door who rings your doorbell every five minutes asking if you can come out to play.

For content sites, each tweet should:

be a unique take at an article giving some bit of info or intriguing fact that will compel someone to clickthrough to your site. Not an RSS feed of your titles.

have a bit of a daily theme and order. Scattershot tweets just make you look like an RSS feed even if you are doing more than just tweeting titles. Tell a story. Although it will appear out of order in most people’s timelines, if someone sees your tweets more than once, visits your page, or uses one of the new threaded tweet services, it’ll show the depth of your content.

leave personal feelings out of it. Even if there is a PR crisis, don’t make a corporate brand feed personal. That’s what identified social voices for the company are for. If you choose the route of official faceless brand twitter identity, stick to it, otherwise you’ll look amatuer and unprofessional.

Be present but not obsessive. Don’t post any content tweet more than once per hour, but do post more than once daily. The response from your audince should dictate how much and of what type of content you should tweet more of. Do a daily, weekly, and monthly analysis to see how your tweets, RTs and clickthroughs are doing and optimize your social strategy based on this analysis.