Prescribed Tweets and the Chamber of Employee Engagement – Episode 117

John Mark Troyer – The Geek Whisperers

In a throwback episode to our social media origins, your Geek Whisperers take on one of our origin stories: the prescribed tweet.

Prescribed tweets are a method of sharing prewritten content that a colleague (most often marketing) requests you send (most often verbatim).

Cons:

• Duplicate tweets on the same hashtag looks inauthentic
• Harms your own brand if you use it
• Minimal effort to add your own edits to it
• You have to offer your own reaction or you harm it
• Maximizing number of tweets is wasteful

Pros:

• Prescription is bad, reframe it as suggested tweets
• Help those less native to the social media platform
• Help those without the time to consume it all (see Don’t Make Me Think)
• Great method of internal notification

Recommendations:

• Share links internally like you share externally
• Help people know how to share it through frameworks, not prescription
• Keep the formatting simple when you share
• Prevent copy/paste-able tweets to avoid bad behavior
• TL;DR – give people training wheels to improve
• Consistent sharing is incredibly effective – get people hooked

If you’re thinking about social influence, revisit these two episodes of the past:

• Podcast 7: Corporate Social Media – You Would Not Survive without Humans
• Podcast 8 – Twitter: You Have To Be Willing To Give More Than Get Back

And if you’re looking for a template, I shared a model used in my past life here: Podcast 2 Addendum: Social Media Activation Kits.

May your internets remain authentic and your ideas become viral.