Guest Post by Sanjiva Persad

What, no Twitter?

A few months ago, I read a great blog post by Ray Grieselhuber on the Ginzametrics blog about Trader Joe’s, and the fact that they, a major grocery chain, didn’t have an official presence on Twitter.

It seemed baffling, and Ray did an excellent job of identifying the benefits of having an official Twitter presence.

It made me think about the largest company in the UK without a Twitter account.

I didn’t specifically check that out, but I’d guess that Costa Coffee is high on the list. Costa is a major high street coffee retailer (and I should add that I love their coffee). Their loyalty program and mailing list work in sync, and they do a good job of keeping me posted with promotions without overwhelming me with emails.

So it was astounding to me that their official Twitter account hadn’t been updated since October of 2008. Costa is on Facebook, however, and their Facebook page has over 175,000 fans and is updated weekly.

So I did the natural thing; I emailed the company.

They replied very promptly, and in a nutshell, they’ve decided to limit their presence on Twitter to their parent company. (On a side note, they’re also working on reducing the size of the massive receipts they currently give every customer, but are not planning to eliminate them, as I suggested, anytime soon).

My initial reaction was one of shock, and I’ve decided to play Devil’s advocate and think of hypothetical reasons for this decision (since none were forthcoming from their communications representative):

1) They have a Facebook page, so why do they need to be on Twitter too?
2) They don’t have the resources to maintain a Twitter account, and if they do it, they want to do it right.

And that’s it. Costa Coffee are probably doing ok without Twitter, but I still think it’s a strange decision.

Can you think of any other reasons for a company NOT to be on Twitter?

Image: Simon Q via Flickr, CC 2.0

Sanjiva Persad is a London-based social media marketer and copywriter who specialises in helping small businesses build their brand online. His home on the web is sanjivapersad.com. He also blogs and tweets.