FreshFishDesign

Twitter has been around for a couple of years now. This article is aimed at people who are still relatively inexperienced with Twitter but who would like to explore how it might help their business.

What is Twitter for and how can it help my business?

Twitter is about sending and receiving short messages on any subject. You can control who you receive messages from. Likewise, other people can choose whether or not they receive messages from you.

Twitter can help with your business because:

• You can use it to inform people about your business and the services or products you offer
• You can reach potential customers that you couldn’t otherwise reach
• It can help you develop relationships with your existing and potential customers
• The single most important rule to remember about Twitter is simply to talk to people. Don’t hit them over the head with your products.

You shouldn’t think of Twitter as an advertising platform. It’s there to allow you and your customers to communicate. Avoid the hard sell; instead, just let people know about stuff you think they will be interested in.

Basic things to remember

Twitter is a network. Your particular part of that network centres on you, your followers, and the people you’re following. The things to bear in mind are:

• Only your followers will see your tweets. So the more followers you have, the wider your audience
• The best way to accumulate followers is to follow someone else. As a rule, if you follow someone, they will normally return the favour
• To build up your network, look at your followers’ followers or at the followers of people you’re following. You’re likely to find further people to follow.

Tips for successful tweeting

Like any social interaction, there are rules and protocols around Twitter. Never spam people by bombarding them with hundreds of unwanted messages. Remember:

• Don’t just plug your products or services over and over again. Try to make each tweet informative – offer your followers something they might want or be interested in. If you run a restaurant, tell people what your specials are that day.
• If your aim is to encourage people to your website via Twitter, try asking questions in your tweets rather than making statements. People will go to your site to find answers.
• Just talk to people like you would in real life. The hard sell isn’t appealing in a face to face meeting; it’s not appealing online either. This is the quickest way to lose followers

Technology

You don’t have to be on Twitter.com on your computer to tweet. You can extend what you do with Twitter by using additional tools and techniques:

• Mobile – you can send and receive tweets from your phone
• Twitter clients – there are many alternatives to tweeting from your browser. Two examples are TweetDeck, which you can download to monitor multiple social network sites including Twitter and Facebook, and HootSuite, which allows you to manage several Twitter accounts simultaneously.
• Integrate with Facebook – you can automatically send your latest tweet to your Facebook status
• Integrate with your website – you can set your site up so that every time you publish a new article, it will automatically tweet it. Plus you can embed a retweet button like the one on this page so that anyone on your site can retweet information they find useful. Try it out – use the button to the right to retweet this article to your followers.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 10th, 2010 at 3:43 pm and is filed under Business development, Social media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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