Earlier this week my company, Weber Shandwick, put out a fantastic white paper on the Fortune 100′s use of Twitter.

The findings are quite compelling:

• 73 percent of Fortune 100 companies registered a total of 540 Twitter accounts.
• 76 percent of those accounts did not post tweets very often
• 53 percent of the accounts did not display personality, or a consistent tone/voice
• 52 percent were not actively engaged
• 50 percent of the Fortune 100 accounts had fewer than 500 followers
• 15 percent were inactive; of those, 11 percent were merely placeholder accounts
• 4 percent were abandoned after being used for a specific event.

Weber Shandwick prescribes five basic, but essential steps for Fortune 100 companies to start to create true engagement and market interaction on Twitter:

1. Listen to conversations.
2. Participate in conversations.
3. Update frequently with valuable information.
4. Reply to people who talk about issues that are important to your company.
5. Retweet relevant conversations.

Full paper here:

Download  it here.