When I couldn’t log onto the Bank of America website Friday to schedule my mortgage payment, my first thought (as it usually is in these kinds of situations) was to check Twitter to see if anyone else was having problems with the site. Well, I quickly realized that I was not alone in my frustration (and I also realized that people who can’t access their money can get VERY angry and say some of the most incredible things!).
To their credit, Bank of America did have a Twitter team responding to the issue. But here’s where the lesson is, so pay attention. The response team’s Twitter handle is @BofA_Help. So every time I searched “Bank of America” or even “bankofamerica” I wasn’t seeing them. All I saw was tweet after tweet berating the bank for it’s down site (and even a threat by one disgruntled customer to burn it down!). I searched BofA too, and somehow never saw their tweets in that search. My tweet about the downed site was actually more to point out what seemed like a huge lack of response:
It wasn’t until they responded to my tweet and included “I work for Bank of America” in their tweet that I knew they even existed. (A sidenote here: BofA Help team, please ask someone if you can take another photo for your profile where it doesn’t look like one of those family portraits where everyone is matchy-matchy. Honestly, until I looked closer, I thought it actually was someone’s family portrait.)
So the simple lesson, as I see it: make sure your company’s name is actually part of your Twitter handle. And if you can’t get a twitter name with your business name (or your name is so incredibly long that it would cut down on your RT-ability because it uses up too many of the 140 characters), you better make sure you know what people are searching for when they look for you…and include those words in your tweets on a regular basis! (But, really, it makes more sense to just make sure your biz name is part of your handle.) Seriously. If I had searched for “Bank of America” and seen tweets like this, it would’ve been a completely different view of the company:
According to the Associated Press, the site was officially down for four hours. But the stream of irritated tweets went on for what seemed like forever… And, unfortunately, if anyone else was searching Twitter like I do, they probably wondered if BofA was even listening.
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