Twitter. Most often described with the off-putting title of “a microblogging platform”, Twitter is actually a highly effective business tool, through which an organization can provide a stream of short (140 character) updates (“tweets”) to an expanding community of followers.
In the last year, Twitter has grown in popularity amongst transit agencies in the US as a tool for communicating with their customers about service changes and general news. While the number of agencies using Twitter is still small, agencies are increasingly trying to figure out how it can be of real strategic value.
Some great articles have been written about the business benefits of “tweeting” (such as here, here and here), but the specific role that Twitter can play in your transit agency requires some internal analysis. A general rule of thumb is to start by considering Twitter in terms of “how we communicate with our customers”, including potential customers.
Twitter provides some specific benefits to transit agencies, such as the ability to provide real-time service updates to customers, but it also offers more traditional marketing benefits, such as generating leads and web traffic. Once a decision has been made about how Twitter will be used to communicate to the world, then it can be assigned to a particular group with specific objectives.
When deciding how to use Twitter in your agency, look towards other related organizations that are already using Twitter, by searching for “#transit” on Twitter.
Avego uses Twitter to communicate the latest in transit related news and technology. You can find us at www.twitter.com/AvegoUSA