Archive > Social Media
Twitter Me This…
Most everyone is familiar with LinkedIn for business networking and facebook for sharing with friends and family. Twitter is a profoundly different social networking tools that has created a new environment for people and business.
Twitter enables you to keep in contact with friends and family, meet new friends or even enhance business brand and customer communications. Twitter asks people “what are you doing” in 140 characters or less. Some people take this question literally, sharing topics like their breakfast or bio break frequencies. Twitter is useful for so much more than just status updates.
Twitter helps connect people as well as businesses instantly and globally, and it’s being used for business networking, sharing photos, videos, and thoughts amongst a mass audience and more. You will be surprised to learn that there is much going on with Twitter than just daily reports on what you’re doing. In fact, you may find Twitter to easily be the best free marketing resource for your business or personal branding out there.
Before you get too excited, remember that the Twitter community doesn’t take kindly to spam, so if your goal is primarily to get online to spam links, perhaps do yourself and everyone else a favor and don’t. It’s OK to share links and talk about your business, but listen and learn. Learn how to build up your social currency. Twitter is about building great relationships. Here are some tips to get started:
- Search for people you know by their email address
- Search directories for people who share similar interests
- Good places are WeFollow.com and Twellow.com
- Begin following people who seem to share interesting updates
- Send replies to the Tweets you enjoyed or ones sent to you
- RT (retweet) posts that you think others will benefit from
- Take time to say hi to your followers and build relationships
- Use TwitterFeed to automatically post when you write new articles, etc.
- Tweet about contests, competitions, events and promotions going on
- Make friends with other people and businesses in your industry
- Include a Twitter widget on your website or blog
- Avoid illegal tactics to try to gain more followers
- Actively engage in conversation as often as you can
- Think of unique things you can offer your followers
Twitter is fun. It’s a great new communications tool and much more than just a social media site or a place to share what you eat. Over time, you will see your friends on Twitter begin to grow. You can share in the experience by giving and receiving valuable information through your tweets. Twitter is a great way to find out firsthand about things that are happening in the world, get real time first-person news reports and more.
It’s fast, it’s simple and it’s fun with 140 characters or less. With these basic tips, you can learn to make the most of Twitter. Take advantage of all that Twitter has to offer by taking advantage of all the ancillary tools, reporting, and feature enhanced additions. You will quickly learn how to make new friends, drive traffic to your websites, create awareness of your offerings and define your online presence by using Twitter.
