Why Engaging Audiences on Twitter Isn't Always the Right Thing...

Someone in my office proposed the idea this week of using our organization's Twitter account to host a "Tweet Contest" to see if we can better engage our audiences with our mission. I found myself quickly saying NO to an idea that normally would strike me as a good one -- after all, any type of activity encouraging interactivity and engagement with an audience on a social network should be a good thing! It's generally proven to be a recipe for success. Taco Bell and Dunkin' Donuts launched successful contests on Twitter, as did the State Department.

However, in a comparison of our Twitter feed and Mashable's 10 Twitter Best Practices for Brands, I believe that my organization is far from ready to host a Twitter contest. Here are a few of the points:

Be authentic and believable - Mashable says that you'll become believable only after you've established trust among your audience. Our Twitter feed currently is operated via an automatic RSS feed that pushes headlines from our website. There is no human behind the feed responding to followers, following people back, or talking with our audience.

Do your research before engaging customers - Mashable suggests "knowing how your customers use Twitter." This can be accomplished easily and for free using a few simple search tools, including Twitter's own search engine, search.twitter.com to see the conversations already happening around your brand and issue. Because we haven't been active on our feed, we really don't have an idea of what conversations are happening about us and around us.

Track metrics and conversation trends - Tracking metrics, also using free tools available online like www.tweetvolume.com, is an easy way to get an idea of how your popular your brand/issue is, how many people click on the links that you push out, etc. Metrics help guide your Twitter strategy going forward because they give you an overall snapshot of your presence on the social media scene. We currently do not have a strategy in place to track metrics or trends.

So, my recommendation to my organization was that we hold off on the contest until we've established the fundamentals outlined in Mashable's guide above.

Do you think I was right in my recommendation?