How much do Telco’s help their customers onto Twitter?

Although many telecommunications companies are using Twitter, some present a mixed message when the full picture is considered. The best way to appreciate this is to consider the customer who wants to use Twitter to get some support, maybe to jump the queue.  Depending on the company they will have very different experiences.  If they want to directly contact the company via twitter they will need to find the ID.  Sometimes it is not easy.  Twitter ID’s are often non standard variants of the corporate name and a simple search on the company can turn up many tweets about the company before one Tweet by the company. In such a situation the customer may go to the corporate web site looking for information on Twitter and is likely to type Twitter into the search box. The results of a brief investigation into what happens when this is tried is outlined below.  The most surprising result is for Comcast who have a very active Twitter support presence which is not promoted on their main web site.

Relative strength of connection back to Twitter

Company	Website to Twitter	Twitter details on the main web site
AT&T	***	http://www.att.com/gen/press-room?pid=5000
Charter	***	http://www.charter.com/Umatter2Charter
Verizon	***	http://www22.verizon.com/socialmedia
DirecTV	***	http://www.directv.com/DTVAPP/content/community
Dish*	***	http://www.dishnetwork.com/community/default.aspx
Qwest*	**	http://www.qwest.com/socialmedia
T-Mobile	**	http://www.t-mobile.com/support/SupportSubContent.aspx?PAsset=Hme_Sup _ContactManage&WT.cg_s=%20support_contactus
TDS	*	http://www.tdstelecom.com/MediaRoom
Sprint
Comcast
Century Link

*Dish and Qwest have a Twitter logo/link at the bottom of the page

Two sites, Qwest and Dish, have Twitter links on the bottom of the home page. The Verizon, AT&T, DirecTV and Charter search results provide an obvious link to a social media summary page. Search on Dish returns a link to the company information page, which refers provides Social media information rather than a link to the community page.  Qwest and TDS have social/media summary pages which refer to Twitter, but the search in Qwest only returns links to press releases and TDS returns nothing, which could be more indicative of a search maintenance problem.  Search in both T-Mobile and Sprint return numerous results for Twitter, but only T-Mobile seem to provide a link to a page with a Twitter follow logo and it is not particularly obvious in the search results listing. Although Sprint has a community page it does not display Twitter follow information and the search results are more about using Twitter on phones than using Twitter to contact Sprint. Despite Comcast’s extensive outreach on Twitter there appears to be very little about it on their web site and Comcast does not appear to have a social media summary page on their main site at all.  Century Link do not feature Twitter on their web site either.

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