Week 4 - Blog 1: Is Target using best Twitter practices?

According to a posting by Diana Freedman on HubSpot Blog (2010), there are nine worst practices for businesses utilizing Twitter. Those include: Too much self-promotion, only including links to the business  blog, follow anyone/everyone, no established personality, non-interaction with other tweeters, not sharing Twitter profile on website, no monitoring, and tweeting only once a week.  The purpose of this post is to determine if Target’s (http://twitter.com/Target?from_source=onebox) is avoiding a few of the unfavorable business Twitter habits.

1.       Target does some self-promotion but surprisingly not as much as a follower would have anticipated.  For example, Target included a link for an Iron Man YouTube video. Diana Freedman suggests that an organization not only share information about themselves but also includes other interesting and useful links/websites (HubSpot, 2010).

2.       Target is following some bloggers that might fall into the description of everyone or anyone category. Currently, Target is following 447 bloggers, many of which don’t contribute much information or make sense to follow. Diana Freedman suggests that an organization be selective about who they follow because the Twitter stream might be filled with irrelevant information (HubSpot, 2010).

3.       Target does not respond to any tweets.  Diana Freedman suggests that a business respond to a few tweets (HubSpot, 2010).  Social networking it about sharing and not about being one sided.

4.       Target tweets more than once a week. On average, the company is tweeting a few times a week.  Diana Freedman suggests that a company tweet at least more than once a week (HubSpot, 2010).

Recommendation: Target can improve its Twittering procedures. Although Target is out there tweeting relevant information about the company and other areas of interest there are many areas where the organization can improve. For example, the company needs to respond to posts, re-evaluate who the company follows, and possibly establish some type of personality, which Target Twitter is completely lacking.