"A brand's Twitter account should serve a a purpose" so the over-blown saying goes. This is often supported by complex-looking Powerpoint presentations involving in-depth audience research and competitor reviews.
Whether it's a fashion brands' dilemma over whether they want to become yet another culture hub (yes, probably) or whether they'll form a curation or creation strategy within the 140 character babble, as long as brand's Twitter account is not endless sales promotion it's not a bad start.
In some cases though, Twitter accounts are forced to morph into what consumers demand. It's fairly easy to speculate that regardless of what O2's initial strategy was, that given their fairly terrible offline customer support (testimonial here from a new customer) the account was going to morph into a customer care centre. Consumers are noisy beasts and Twitter lets them be so. There's nothing like word of mouth to terrify a company.
And then there's Betfair who have essentially begun to spout whimsy and nonsense. A mix of fictional (we presume) adventures to the moon, and parody of motivational sayings the account breaks rules; tweeting a lot (they're noisy), and it's pretty much unrelated to the product (which I like). So why bother? Well, in the peculiar circumstance I even want to play online poker, I'll probably turn to them. And others who are more inclined, will likely do so as well.
Beyond a strategy of 'following some important people' the strategy seems to be to provide people with a small break from the world. It definitely has a personality, albeit an odd one. I'm curious as to whether they've tasked one person with the role or a few. Is it planned, or just words thrown at the internet? Either way it's wonderful. Not that I'm inciting all companies to do the same nonsense (Christ, that would be loud) but for a one off, it's wonderful. And most importantly, it's not got a personality run by a stuffed animal.
Find them @betfairpoker