During Thursday’s BAI Retail Delivery Conference General Session, more than 200 banking industry leaders learned about Twitter from Isaac “Biz” Stone, co-founder of Twitter and @biz to Twitter users.

Titled “Tapping into a New Generation of Consumers,” the session was led by Rich Karlgaard, Forbes magazine publisher and Digital Rules columnist who interviewed Biz. After a little background into Twitter’s beginnings, the session quickly moved to some Twitter best practices:

1. Don’t think of Tweets as broadcasting.
2. Work at building a relationship with the people you are talking with.
3. Listen. Use real-time search to know what your customers are saying about your bank and about banking issues.
4. Keep it casual so that you can humanize the bank for your customers.
5. Understand that Twitter is a real-time medium. You can’t lob out a question and then walk away.
6. Learn to walk away. Social media: Facebook, Twitter, etc., don’t need 24-hour monitoring, but you do need to answer questions that your customers pose.
7. Be authentic.
8. Thinking of providing a value to your customers before you worry about the ROI.

Watch my next post for some specific examples on how banks are using social media.