Multiple twitter accounts for Different countries...

[esendex]

Ok, so we currently operate in the UK, Australia, Ireland, Spain and France.

Currently we have a different twitter accounts for each Country. This can be difficult to manage as we are going it all from the UK.

I can understand that having separate accounts for foreign language countries is perhaps suitable (we have foreign staff tweeting in their native tongue), but my question is this:

Is it worth just tweeting all English speaking activity from one account. I mean at the end of the day we are one company, and also our activity in other countries won't effect our followers, in fact wouldn't it just make them realise we are a global brand?

What are the advantages and disadvantages of gradually deleting the other accounts and tweeting all English stuff from the one account?

Cheers,

[Gaveltek-173238]

The plain old simple fact about deleting twitter accounts is that you will lose followers and potential opportunity to shed some light on your brand and service (no to mention build some pretty solid links to great content). The idea in having foreign twitter accounts is to be able to adequately represent the locals in their own language, destroying the language barrier and bringing everyone a warm fuzzy. So take a good look at your referral sources, conversions from twitter vs the amount of time and energy your staff is taking to manage all these accounts. That equation should spit out a suitable response.

That being said my two companies have 1 twitter account each and employees are able to create their own and tweet as they wish (within reason) we have been able to get followers from most developed countries and tweet entirely in english, with a smattering of foreign words here and there.

in the end your analytics and referral data should be more than enough to answer any questions of effectiveness you might have.

Raven tools (and soon SEOmoz) has some potent Social Tracking / Social Mention features, maybe take a look at those as well.