Twitter for Business: Managing Employee Twitter Accounts

On starting my first day at 4Ps Marketing (yes I’m very excited) as a Social Media Executive, one of the first things to do was to look at the current strategies of social media accounts. I have an employee Twitter account that has been setup for me and is owned by the company. I’m sure that many employees have used company Twitter accounts for business and have been setup for them when they start a new job. When they leave their position they effectively leave their account that has been used for business in their previous employers hands.

This raises the question, when employees leave their employer and their Twitter account is it right for a new employee in a similar position to take over the account? If the nature of the twitter account is similar and used for company purposes would this sit well in the Twitter community? In face to face situations you do not want to deceive people and gain a bad reputation, this is also the case in social media. Is there a professional way to go about using a previous Twitter account without deceiving your followers or should a new account be setup? If the previous employee was in regular contact with company contacts on a professional basis or personally would they notice if the profile picture and name changed? Will this damage the reputation of the company and reduce followers incredibly quickly or would it be a good way to start a conversation quickly with people who are interested in the same topics?

Twitter for business can be quite political especially if the employee is a key influencer and is connected with many clients. These types of issues, especially Twitter in business will become more and more commonplace and employers will need to set out social media contracts to tackle this.

It will be interesting to hear your answers and to help me make a decision with how I go about my 4Ps Marketing Twitter account!

Summary; So in short should I take on an existing company Twitter account in the best way possible way or should I start a brand new account?

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