You have created a Twitter account. Now what? How often should you tweet? Who should represent your brand?

Several companies have opted for the CEO route -- handing the Twitter reigns to the top executive. Others grant Twitter autonomy to several marketing executives, hoping for diverse, consistent tweet coverage, and still others give the responsibility to anyone with spare time.

Determining the appropriate internal resources to manage a Twitter presence is an important decision. Your Twitter representatives need to have a firm grasp of corporate brand guides, adhere to a social media strategy, and still manage to promote interesting and interactive content. Achieving all three Twitter objectives simultaneously is not easy, but it can be done.

Your marketing department is the obvious first choice for Twitter talent, but if resources are tapped, these are a few characteristics a Twitterer must have:

Spell check is optional
At its best, Twitter is headline writing. The confining 140-character limit affords managers little wiggle room to be vague, inarticulate, or verbose. Make sure your Twitter resources write well and often. To push out timely and poignant tweets, there isn't time to labor over each word, but each word must count. Recruit people who like writing and are versed on news in your industry. This will help establish your company's feed as a premiere destination for up-to-date content.

A sense of humor is always helpful because, ideally, Twitter feeds can help lend personality to your brand. While several brands are able to link revenue to Twitter promotions, I think most companies are using Twitter to brand and personify their company. If this is your situation, make sure that your Twitter team knows what that personality is and has the ability to portray it to your followers.

Once resources have been appointed, your company must decide how much time and energy it wants to devote to Twitter. Activity runs the gamut from 30 tweets a day to one lonely inaugural message. I think a reasonable and effective goal is somewhere between five to 10 tweets a day, and of course activity can vary depending on the" news day."

 If you just launched a product or opened a new office, kick up your activity and be as proactive as possible. Interesting tweets will increase your followership, giving you more followers to interact with the next time you have exciting company news to promote.

Rallying multiple resources
If you devote several resources to assist in your Twitter campaign, make sure you have a plan that breaks out content, frequency, and response expectations. Some concerns marketers have expressed to Geary Interactive include the risk of duplicating content and a disconnect in tone. The likelihood of this happening increases with the number of Twitterers you have on your team.

To avoid this problem, take a cue from newspapers and establish content beats. If each resource has a beat they are responsible for covering, they can be sure that no one else will be promoting the same content. It will also give your team a sense of ownership over the Twitter account.

If consumers are talking about your company a lot, it would be smart to dedicate at least one person to responding to others' comments. By running Twitter searches and monitoring hash tags, this person can act as your Twitter customer service liaison. Since consumers are becoming more and more accustomed to this interaction, marketers need to ensure this proactive Twitter conversation is accounted for.

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