Screen Grab from ENGAGEMENTdb Report

Brands are worth billions of dollars to companies, and companies will go to great lengths to protect them offline and online. Type the name of a brand on Google, and your first result is certainly going to be the website of the company who owns it.  The same can’t be said when you search for a brand on Twitter.

No question Twitter is gaining corporate acceptance.  A new Burson-Marsteller and Proof Digital Media analysis found that in 2009, Twitter surpassed blogging as the social media platform of choice — at least among the Fortune 100.  Or take Charlene Li’s ENGAGEMENTdb analysis of the world’s 100 most valuable brands. The most engaged brands like Starbucks, SAP, Toyota and Dell are using it with great success.

At the same time, in searching for the 100 most valuable brands on Twitter, I found roughly 75 percent don’t appear to own the Twitter page that bears their brand name.  And for some of those that do like @thomsonreuters and @amazon, the pages seem generic or worse like @colgate under lock and key. (The words “Welcome to the World of Colgate-Palmolive” don’t seem very welcoming.)

Take McDonalds for example. The top search on Google is, no surprise, a link to the company’s official website. Now type in @McDonalds on Twitter or “Twitter McDonalds” on Google.  Here are the results.

Perhaps we are just in the early stages of Twitter. In time I am sure that will change.  That seems to be the case with Facebook, where increasingly brands are taking ownership of their unofficial pages. And I should add most companies have Twitter sites with some variation of their brand like @BlackBerryCool and @DellOutlet.

Branding Your Twitter: Top Brand Best Practices

How important is branding?  I think a great deal.  Consider @sony. Its page is so generic that @8bitjoystick asked if it was the official Twitter page for Sony.

The cost to make a branded Twitter site seems nominal compared to the $200,000 plus I have read it costs to create a dedicated YouTube Channel.

So which top 100 brands have taken the time to brand their page and provide added utility?

I like the look of @MTV’s background.  They have made the page consistent with its followers.  So has Accenture.  @accenture reinforces the company’s traditional advertising.  @Toyota is not very elaborate, but I like how they lay out other links and identify their Twitter team. At least, @Ford shows their cars.

In the end, I know content and the level of engagement are far more important than the look and feel of your Twitter page. Comcast hasn’t suffered with an @comcast Twitter page out there.  Especially when you have a wildly successful @Comcastcares page.  But as Twitter takes off, we may find brands going after rogue pages more aggressively.

Let me get back to you.

Are you one of the Google 162?

That’s the number of people Google follows on @google. Or are you one of its more than 1.2 million followers? The list includes some pretty influential people like Jeremiah Oywang from Forrester Research, Jen Preston, the social-media editor of The New York Times, Erick Schonfeld, co-editor of TechCrunch, and Kara Swisher, columnist, BoomTown, AllThings D.com.

To be sure, @Google is not Google’s only Twitter page;  there are many others including @GoogleTutor (following 4,595) @googlereader, @AdSense, @googlenews. But the Google 162 does bring to light  company follow practices on Twitter.

If the name of the name is engagement, there is no way @Google could actively interact with 1.2 million followers even if none of them was a spammer. And its mission is to provide “News and updates from Google.” So it makes sense that most of the people they follow are members of the media.

Google’s following/follower ratio is the most dramatic. As a basis of comparison, I went to Charlene Li’s new analysis and checked out the most engaged brands in the social media space.  Dell was given a NA, because they do not have a primary @Dell Twitter page, but use many others to reach their customers. When asked about their follow policy, a Dell spokesperson said that they “do not have one on who we follow. Anyone could be customer or potential customer.”  And by sheer numbers, Starbucks is the biggest follower of the top 10 brands on Charlene’s list.

Twitter Activity of The Top Brands

So what is your company’s follow strategy on Twitter?  Follow some, follow all or follow none at all. Follow those who follow you, engage with you, or have something relevant to say?  And what happens if  you decide to stop following someone? And as an individual or customer, do you want to followed (or tracked?) It is either very flattering, very intrusive or the best way to send direct messages.

Your answers should reflect your company’s strategic purpose for using Twitter in the first place.  They should be as important as who controls the content, how often you tweet and what you tweet about.  As far as I concerned it goes to how you want to engage your customers and the public at large.

The subject has come currency. Robert Scoble has explored the topic and believes that “2,000 is his cut off for intimacy.”

Don’t tell that to Zappos Shoes (403.5464 following/1,046,122 followers) and Comcast (25,895 following/24,565 followers). Their engagement is clearly very different from Google’s.  For them, Twitter is a customer relations tool and marketing platform respectively.

As Frank Eliason, Comcast’s director of Digital Care wrote me, “Our follow policy is based out of respect for those taking the time to follow us and it allows customers to send us a direct message, which for many is their preferred method to contact us”

For some added perspective, I went to the  Twitter 101: A Special Guide for businesses that Twitter recently issued. It includes case studies and covers the basics such as how to get started and basic terms. Here is what they had to say about following on Twitter.

3. Find highly relevant people and companies to follow.

On my Twitter page, I have more followers than I am following.  That is a good rule of thumb.  You should follow those who provide useful information or with whom you regularly engage.  (Another a rule of thumb, no link in the profile, no follow.) It saves me the trouble of following bogus sites.

Ultimately, I think following is about building relationships and sharing information. Regardless of how expansive you want to be, it is important to reach consensus on  your follow policy before you begin tweeting. It will help define your intentions and purpose on Twitter.  I also think that your policy should be public and accessible from your company’s Twitter page.

Let me get back to you.