UK Business Twitter Users and What We Can Learn From Them

Love it or hate it, Twitter is the fastest growing social media site and is transforming the way we do business online, from promotion and marketing right through to customer service and problem solving. As ever more businesses get to grips with the social networking tool, we take a look at some of the biggest and best UK business Twitter accounts and what we can learn from them.

Dorothy Perkins (@Dorothy_Perkins)

The high street fashion retailer Dorothy Perkins are a shining example of how Twitter can be turned into a customer service tool. More people than ever are turning to social media when they have an issue not only to vent about it but now to resolve it, as the method is a much faster way of getting through to the company, and tends to get a better response! People are sick of waiting on hold for hours to call centres or waiting days for email queries to be answered, so contacting a company through social media is the new customer service regime, and people want a response FAST.

Dorothy Perkins display a dedicated attitude to customer service on their Twitter, with this example displaying the response time as being within half an hour, despite it being outside office hours:

This is what people want, as social media never sleeps, so you have to be prepared to be active on social media at all times. Whether yourself or a whole team of social media managers are in place, make sure when the office hours end, communication online doesn’t. It only takes a moment to send a 140 character Tweet to let a customer know they are important.

StreetwiseSubbie.com (@StreetwiseSubbi)

The UK construction sector solution provider turned hero last December when they took to Twitter to campaign against late payment damaging the industry. The campaign made use of Twitter’s ‘hashtag’ feature, allowing people to Tweet about the campaign and search for other Tweets relating to the campaign. The hashtag used by the company, #buildfair4all, was also the name of the campaign, and it soon became of national interest thanks to the use of the hashtag to spread the word on Twitter.

In the screenshot below you can see how national companies and the national press picked up on the campaign and the hashtag:

This is just one example of why a hashtag is more than just a symbol, and how the clever implementation of it in business Tweets can help spread the word and even set a campaign ‘trending’ nationwide, or even internationally.

Innocent Drinks (@innocentdrinks)

The UK based healthy drinks company famed for their smoothies are all about interaction on Twitter. But how do they get interaction? They show a bit of personality and interest in their audience, and their audience give bags of attention back in return. They don’t just sit at their desk Tweeting about their latest offers, they Tweet about what interests their audience, and they do this by taking note of what gets a reaction. It just so happens that their followers enjoy random facts, for example:

This screenshot shows just a minute amount of the full engagement received for this one random fact Tweet. And another important lesson to be learned from Innocent Drinks; always ReTweet (RT) people who engage with you. It takes a second, its good practice, and it goes a long way towards building good online relationships with your customers.

These three examples alone show the power that Twitter can hold for a business if it is used correctly, and there is still much more to be learnt as the micro-blogging site is still only in its first decade. What the future will bring for UK businesses on Twitter is still left to speculation, but right now there is still much to be taken advantage of on the platform, including a newly revamped advertising service.