Stop Twitter Spam

@pandora_radio is a great example of how companies should interact on Twitter. If you look at their profile, you’ll see that the Following / Follower ratio (360:380 as of the writing of this blog post) is about equal and their tweets are very often personalized. And most importantly, @pandora_radio hand picks everyone that they follow (see below). They are not using screen-scraping scripts / bots to build up their follower base.

Every business who is thinking of jumping on to Twitter should look at what Pandora is doing and follow their lead.

Here’s a comment that Lucia from Pandora left on Colin Carmichael’s blog.

Pandora decided to join the conversation on Twitter because we saw a lot of people twittering questions and suggestions for Pandora. We thought it would be helpful to bring our customer service to listeners using Twitter, in case they hadn’t bothered to email us with those questions/suggestions. Also, any reports of Pandora bugs or strangeness twittered by listeners are reported immediately to our team.

I’ve found people really like getting their Pandora questions answered so quickly and easily, right in their twitterstream.
I answer all questions, either with a public tweet or a private message. I’ve also posted my personal email address in the stream, for any questions longer than 140 characters. Several followers have taken me up on that.

Our intention does occasionally get misunderstood on Twitter, and as there is no way to DM someone who isn’t following you, it can be tricky to address potential misunderstandings.

I hand pick who @pandora_radio follows.
We usually only follow twitterers who post positively about Pandora, and those who have more than 50 or 75 followers/followees. Those users seem to be using Twitter as a public communication venue, and it’s often a safe assumption that they don’t mind one more follower. And in most cases, they’re pleased with such an easy way to get in touch with a company they’re interested in engaging with, and they follow us back. (You’ll notice that @pandora_radio has almost a 1 to 1 follower relationship.)

There are small and large businesses on Twitter benefiting users; I have seen many positive and impressive customer service uses of Twitter. There are potentially nefarious and annoying uses of Twitter, yes. And I understand concerns for privacy, absolutely.
Whether Twitter Spam exists: it’s an important dialog.

Thanks for reading, and for the ongoing conversation!

- Lucia, from Pandora
[Lucia at pandora dot com]