This week, our team that runs the support handle on Twitter for customer service reached a milestone -250,000 followers! The team started tweeting in August 2009, so that is quite an accomplishment.   While “followers”  is more of a vanity metric (hey, look how cool I am), as a brand it does tend to give you bragging rights internally and of course if you want to get a message out to your community quickly it helps to have a few thousand followers.

Looking back here is how we were able to accomplish this, we:

1. Created Valuable content - All publicly sent content was chosen based on its usefulness to the overall community.
2. Listened to the community – The team paid attention to the community on Twitter and beyond to understand pain points, frequently asked questions and topics of interest.
3. Acted as a concierge – 140 characters doesn’t give you a lot to work with, so the the team tends to act as a traffic director, leading people to the right content at the right time. This means of course that we  had to have great content on the Dot Com, YouTube, Blog and Community to point to.
4. Looked for opportunities for cross-promotion – We recognized that our  twitter channel shouldn’t  live in a bubble. We  include links to the twitter account on other branded channels and we cross link to those channels from our twitter account.  An example of this type of integration – some of our Twitter team writes on our support blog, and our blog content is always promoted via our twitter channel.
5. Took it offline - Social media gives you the opportunity to “humanize” the brand. Engaging in conversations with our customers has allowed us to better understand the needs of our community by having two-way conversations. Taking the team offline to events has given us the opportunity to promote what they do online and at the same time build deeper relationships.
6. Paid attention to “influencers” – We paid attention to folks who had influence, but we also ensured it  didn’t rule everything we did.  Most importantly we recognized that influence wasn’t always the number of followers.
7. Were interesting and unique – The team added pictures of themselves to the background, including their favorite food and their initial so followers would know who was responding to their questions. They also added a team mascot (a dog named Chico) who occasionally tweets for them!
8. Used relevant #hashtags - We used hashtags, but sparingly. We looked to understand what words customers might search for that may not already be within the content of the tweet and were relevant, and discovered #hashtags our fans were already using that would be fitting for our content.
9. Shared information internally – Having the ability to communicate directly to our customers on channels like Twitter allowed us to learn a lot. But, we also had to find ways to action what we learned and in some circumstances let the community know we were doing something with what the information.
10. Tweeted often, but not too often (conversational) – Our community told us when we tweeted to much and so we found ways to balance our public tweeting by using direct messages to offer support.

What has worked for you on Twitter?