When integrating social media marketing into your overall marketing plan, an option many companies are choosing is to create a Twitter account for the CEO or company as a whole. An effective strategy, it gives your business or brand a personal face, making it seem more accessible and interested in the desires and needs of your targeted audience. As with any new strategy, there are immediate benefits to such a plan. However, there are also drawbacks and things to avoid in implementing a Twitter marketing strategy for your CEO or company.

A Benefit of Creating a Twitter Account for Your CEO: By setting your CEO or other company VIPs up on Twitter, you humanize your company, giving customers, clients and other contacts direct and personal access to your company. Whether solving problems, answering questions, addressing needs or simply just making the company seem more accessible as a whole, a CEO on Twitter presents an engaging face for your company in the social media world.

A Drawback of Creating a Twitter Account for Your CEO: Simply put, social media marketing takes time. While marketing is usually left to marketing departments or employees specifically dedicated to the task, participating on Twitter takes valuable time from a CEO or other company VIP. Twitter is only effective with regular and consistent use, and may be difficult to fit into the daily schedule of people who do not usually dedicate parts of their day to marketing. While Twitter marketing does not have to be a full time job, conversing and interacting with Twitter followers can take up a big chunk of day to day work hours.

A Pitfall to Creating a Twitter Account for Your CEO:  Marketing is a delicate process, especially social media marketing. Twitter is so public that everything your CEO says or does on the service is available to be seen by millions every day. One wrong step, insensive remark or misstep will be picked up by retweets, blogs and consumer interest reporters faster that ever possible before. For a CEO who is not usually involved in marketing techniques, it is easy to put a foot wrong on Twitter, not realizing how the whole brand will be affected by what seems to be an hoenst mistake. A reputation is easy to ruin on the internet, and extremely difficult to rebuild.