According to a recent Edison Research study 51% of active Twitter users follow companies, brands or products on social networks.  That means they are most likely following your brand and your product.

That means they are discussing how, why, when and where they use your product and service.  And you’re not there? 

Twitter now has 105,779,710 registered users with 300,000 signing up every day.  180 million unique visitors use the site every month.  It’s a giant laboratory and meeting place and it’s likely your product is being discussed.  I’ll bet if you did a Twitter Search right now, you’ll find someone talking about your product, company or something you product solves.  Try it.

The point is that if you’re participating, you’re learning more about how your products and services are being used.  You become more effective as a Technical Communicator because you’re discovering more about your customers.  You’re also able to socially curate the best of Twitter in order to learn more about your industry, competitors or problems your product solves.

Here are the questions to ask yourself or your Technical Communicator

1. Out of the 55 million tweets per day, how many are about your product/service or about something your product solves?
2. If 180 million unique visitors use Twitter every month, why aren’t we asking them questions about our product to learn more about how we solve their problems?
3. Why aren’t we building a following on Twitter so that we can ask our followers to help us with market research?
4. Why aren’t we monitoring consumer sentiment about our product or service so that we can take action to rectify or improve negative situations?
5. Since there are ongoing conversations about our product/service, why aren’t we participating in them to build good will?
6. Since we can segment and target users on Twitter, why don’t we convey information about our product directly to customers and prospective customers?
7. Why don’t we provide valuable links to reports, videos, whitepapers about our product to Twitter users?
8. Why aren’t we asking Twitter followers to help improve our product documentation?
9. Why aren’t you following and networking with other Technical Communicators to learn more about trends, strategies and best practices?
10. Did you know that there are many organizations that provide drip learning through daily tweets about their product or service?  Follower counts increase as a result.

As we enter into this social, Enterprise 2.0 world of business, it’s becoming more and more about customer service. What we do after that is secondary.  The fact that you can publically reply to tweets about your products or what your products solves is incredible.

You’ve never had that kind of reach before as a Technical Communicator.  Word of mouth is the game now.  Word of mouth is how it used to be, and is now that on steroids.

So how do i get started? Read Anne Gentle’s article on the subject.  Also see Amit Agarwal’s use case on Dell.

Any objections to using Twitter as Technical Communicators seems trite.  The medium has proved itself.   That some still believe technical communication can still be done with Microsoft Word and a static webpage  is illusory and quite anachronistic.

But as obvious as that may seem to some of us, there are still quite a few people that believe the field of technical communication is still about one-way communication with our customers.  No sharing, no feedback, no curation.

Which leaves us with one more big question.  Why are Technical Communicators not embracing new Web 2.0 technologies like Twitter?