The Chase for Twitter Responses

I was pleasantly surprised how many companies replied to people in this class. I do not have a personal Twitter anymore, and I have never attempted to reach out to a company on Twitter before this assignment. At first, I did not know where to begin. How in the world was I going to get huge companies like Amazon and Chipotle to reply to me?

I started by following numerous companies that I use. The assignment said to follow five, but I decided to follow over 10. Tweeting more companies would give me a better chance of getting responses. Then, I looked at the companies’ pages to give me a feel for what they tweet. Also, this showed me what things they retweet, like, and reply to. Also, I looked at what other people in my class were tweeting and how they were getting responses from companies. This helped me focus in some of my tweets to make them more visible and interesting to the companies.

I realized that companies are more likely to respond to tweets that have photographs or videos on them. To some companies, I tweeted personal photos of me using their products. I thought that this would make them more likely to interact with my tweet because it was advertising their product. I tweeted BANGS Shoes a photo of my friend and me wearing their shoes at a concert, and they liked and retweeted my tweet. To Eno Hammocks, I tweeted a photo of me using my hammock in the woods, and the company liked my tweet.

Also, many companies seemed to respond to other people’s tweets that contained GIFs, so I started tweeted GIFs at some companies. Through these GIFs, I tried to employ humor in my tweets. Amazon and Chipotle replied to my tweets that had GIFs. I also got a reply from Girl Scouts and a like from Yeti Coolers.

On the other hand, some companies did not interact with my tweets at all even though I used the same tactics when tweeting them. Some companies, including Target, Red Bubble, Netflix, Nalgene, Tazo, Jimmy Johns, and North Face, did not engage with my tweets. Most of these companies have hundreds of thousands or even millions of followers, so I did not expect replies from all of them. I think if I tweeted some of these companies repeatedly, they would have been more likely to reply.

Overall, I learned that most companies are eager to respond to their Twitter followers. This shows that these companies truly value customer service. Social media usage is steadily rising, and many companies are learning to work with this. Also, this assignment taught me to be persistent when trying to accomplish something.