And now we can’t quite look them in the eye.

We don’t know whether it was a joke gone wrong, a disgruntled community manager or someone hacking into the account. But it’s a bit awkward, because it was quite likely that it was posted by someone who had access to the account.

“How does something like that happen?” you might ask. Easy. You gave the password to the wrong person.

These four easy rules help prevent such schoolboy slip-ups happening to your brand:

Don’t use stupid passwords

I’ve seen some stupid passwords in my time, ranging from brandname1 to the agency’s post code. Come on. You can do better than that. And certainly don’t use the same password for multiple different brands. I’ve known agencies use one password for all their accounts. Literally every single one. And I bet they haven’t changed it, which leads me to the next point…

Change passwords regularly

I know it’s easier to have the same password for a long time. No doubt saved in a excel file with ALL the other login details for the brand. But it’s not secure. And now that person that left your company 6 months ago can still access the account.

Only give out to those who need it

Does every single person working on the account need the password? No. So don’t give it to them.

Consider using third-party apps that have multi-user access permissions

If you are going to allow lots of people to login to the account you might want to require them to use a third party app to do so. Platforms such as buddy media and hootsuite allow a single admin account to have the login details which can then be granted to other users (and revoked if necessary).

There you go. Four ridiculously simple things to do to keep your Twitter account safe. So simple it’s almost insulting. But I bet most brands are breaking at least one or two of these rules.

Having multiple people managing a brand’s outposts isn’t a bad idea per se; in fact for many larger brand it may be a necessity. But a user needs to know what to expect when they engage with these outposts. There are two options when you have multiple people managing a single account. You either ensure that these people follow strict rules about how to talk, ensuring that they are talking as the brand.

Or you allow each person to bring their own tone of voice to the account, but you clearly state that users are engaging with a specific individual. This can be as simple as appending their name to the end of a tweet or status update, or having separate accounts for these individuals.

You need to decide which approach to take to ensure you are delivering consistency. A common irregularity on brand accounts is that some individuals chose to say “we” and others chose to say “I”. On a single account this can get confusing, and leaves the audience confused as to whom they are actually talking with.

The solution is simple, clearly outline your approach; decide whether or not your account warrants more than one person managing it. Do some research, how big is your brand currently in social media. Are thousands of people talking about your products but no one from your company is responding? In which case you might to fortify your social media presence with a solid team of individuals. What are your long-term objectives for the accounts? What specifically are you looking to get out of your presence? Is it customer service, brand education, improving relationships or driving sales? How many people will it take to meet these objectives? And possibly most importantly of all, how much can you afford to spend?

Then decide who is best placed to be managing your profiles. If you want to be delivering customer service through twitter, then someone from the customer service department needs to be involved.

Then give these people the knowledge they need to properly run these profiles.

And as always, continually monitor and review your progress. If you are having huge successes on Facebook, but the level of engagement is being marred by only having one person managing the presence then it may be time to re-evaluate. And similarly, if you’ve put together a team of ten people to manage a Facebook page, but the growth hasn’t been quite what you anticipated, it might well be time to scale back.

Ultimately, the number of people you have managing your brand online depends on how active your consumers are in the social space, and how active you want to be with them. Getting the balance right can be tricky, but the first and most important thing to get right is to have a clear approach as to how you want to be represented online.

Tim Aidlin and Karsten Januszewski of Mix Online have produced a tool that allows you to pull in tweets from a specified hashtag and store them for later analysis. The great thing is that when you first run the tool it will pull in as many mentions as it can find, but if you then leave it running ti will auto refresh every ten minutes. Not only does it produce pretty graphs itself but it also allows you to export to Excel for more in depth analysis.

This tool is very useful to a great number of people for many different reasons. I manage a number of brands on a day to day basis, and being able to track certain hashtags is incredibly useful, especially when we run campaigns using a specific hashtag. And just a few days ago I attended a conference where the use of a hashtag was prolific, using this tool @Jas was able to pull in all the tweets and store them for later reference. Incredibly useful, something I expect to be on a fairly regular basis. Thanks go to @Jas for pointing me in the direction of this great tool!

So what are landing pages?

It’s simple really; it’s a certain page that is created for new visitors from specific areas such as the link from your Twitter profile. This guide focuses on creating a Twitter landing page, but the principle can be applied to visitors from other areas. The content will probably largely overlap, but it can be nice to have a note or specific content for users from different locations, such as people clicking on one of your ads, your facebook profile or your youtube channel, dig, reddit etc.

NOTE: a landing page is more than just an about page. Actually, in many senses, it’s less. The landing page is meant to give the visitor a very brief understanding of who you are and what you do. About pages tend to be longer and more detailed, with some authors describing each major character and story arch. This isn’t necessary for a landing page.

What should I put on my landing page?

• A brief bio of yourself. Nothing major, a few lines will suffice
• A description of your blog. This can be more detailed than your personal bio, but don’t spend too long on. Try to make it as concise as possible, and it goes without saying; make the blog sound awesome
• Links to other stuff you do. Do you have another blog? A facebook page? A vlog? Link to them!
• Finally, a link back to Twitter (Facebook, YouTube etc) with a suggestion for the visitor to follow you!

The most important rule is to keep it short. People have come to your site from Twitter to find out a little more about you, not your whole life story. Put too much and people will get bored and leave.

Why should I bother?

The book metaphor wasn’t enough? Okay, I’ll extend it. Imagine that after you’ve opened the book there is a personal note in there just for people who have bought the book from a specific shop. Won’t those people feel special? And loved? And at the end of the day, that’s what it’s all about. Making people feel loved.

Also, it doesn’t take more than 5 minutes so you really have no excuse not to.

This is further broken down into 20% of tweets expressing a sentiment, of which about half were positive and about a third negative. The remaining 80% did not express sentiment but instead were largely questions about brands and answers either from the brand, or from the community itself.

This study is significant for several reasons. Firstly it provides conclusive evidence that conversations about brands are occurring on Twitter, and in large volume. This means that with successful monitoring of the channel a brand can learn vast amount from its customers. This information can be used in a variety of ways, to discover and improve where consumers find complaint as well as to discover and build on compliments.

However, this should be common sense, and is definitely well known in the social media community. What is more significant however, is the degree to which people are turning to Twitter as a customer service tool, with large numbers of consumers asking questions about brands. And the community is responding. This has implications for businesses. Brands on Twitter can harness the power of Twitter to streamline their customer service offerings. The danger lies in not having a brand outpost on Twitter; if customers are receiving bad advice and support from the Twitter community it will reflect badly on the brand, even if they aren’t the ones giving the advice. Consumers expect them to be there. The degree of control they exert over the customer support questions is a topic for another day.

The most important thing to take from this is that vast amounts of people are flocking to Twitter for customer support, but there are few brands that are actively promoting their Twitter outposts as sources of help. More worryingly is the number of brands that are still not monitoring the conversation and just broadcasting out the brand message. What they fail to realise is that these conversations are happening right now, whether they are there or not.