ICM - Leeds Design Agency

As the wonderful world of Twitter picks up pace, becoming one of the most talked about and important social networking tools online, many brands are dipping their toes in. Last year it was all about how brands can tap into the marketing potential of Facebook, an area where nothing seemed to materialise and marketing departments struggled to work out how best to open communication with the millions of users. This year brands are already starting to turn their attention to Twitter and some have a phenomenal number of followers.

A good example of this is @starbucks. The Starbucks brand lends itself perfectly to the kind of communication Twitter is designed for. They built their brand on reputation alone, spending little on advertising and so the word of mouth nature of Twitter fits perfectly with this ethos. It has turned out to be a great way for them to communicate with their loyal customers and being at the forefront of social media raises their reputation amongst their obsessive fan base.

I’ve recently been researching how the travel industry uses social media as part of building up a top tips for the travel industry style newsletter (this is in response to our client Superbreak using banner ads on several high profile sites such as Digg). I found, to my surprise, that several travel brands were already using Twitter, and I found a great list of travel twitterers on travel industry blog Journeys through travel. The only twitterer that I would follow is @richardbranson as I am interested in him. I thought about following @icelandexpress, mainly due to my obsession with Iceland, but it appeared to be a little dull to follow an airline. (The Iceland Weather Report is a great blog about Iceland if you share my obsession.)

So I think that brands with either personality or a personality that is part of a brand are going to find that Twitter is littered with potential riches, but many brands will flounder and possibly come in for criticism if they don’t tweet right.