Get started with Twitter

Choose Your Branding, Business or Personal

You’ll want a business brand if you want to use Twitter for your marketing, event announcements, new blog/website content. A personal brand would centered around your life and want a place to discuss your business, your passions, the interesting happenings in your life, pictures things you like. Some small businesses have no separation between the owner’s personal brand and reputation from the businesses. If that’s your case, you’d be better off building your personal brand with Twitter until you grow into a need for a separate Twitter account. Now that you know the direction of your twitter account you can go sign up.

Customize Your Profile

Make it unique to you. Add a picture of yourself, your name and a layout that represents you. Twitter is only a means of connecting with an other person, not a company face. Make your twitter profile have the same kind of personality that you have and a good representation of interacting with you.

Build Your Network: Find People to Follow

See who you already know by doing an address book import.

Hit the search. Find thought leaders in your industry, peers, and competitors. Try familiar names to your business. Follow them and some of their followers

Still searching. This time your going to be looking for keywords related to your business. This will give you selection of people who are talking about your products or competitors right now and you can jump in and reply to their tweets. Go to some of the profiles and get involved in the conversations.

Building a network on Twitter is a lot like like a network event. Get over the awkwardness. Jump in and make a useful contribution to the conversation. Give people a reason to follow you by having something interesting to say.

Use the favorites to save the golden nugget tweets that showcase your brand. These could be great feedback used to improve service or your product, or testimonials from your clients that you want to organize and archive. Favorites as testimonials helps build your credibility since a trusted and reachable third party publicly said something good about you.

Find and communicate with your customers. Build a relationship with as many clients as you can on Twitter to build you brand and be that much closer to your market. It’s a great competitive advantage to be immediately available on Twitter.

Tweet helpful content. Finding value in 140 characters is less time consuming than writing a newsletter or blog post so you can do it without taking much time in your day. Add value to your followers by giving something good.

What the Heck is Twitter?

Twitter has carved itself the functionality similar other internet applications you are already familiar with but offers enough differences to be a unique platform.

Twitter is like…

1. Blogging, but limited to 140 character chunks of text
2. Text messages/SMS but available on web/desktop/mobile
3. Chat rooms but you get to choose who you’re having a public conversation with
4. IM‘ing but all tweets are archived and viewable on the web
5. Status updates on Facebook and Myspace but no other functionality

Anatomy of Twitter

Tweet: the 140 character blurb to answer “what are you doing now?”

@reply: the way to respond back to a tweet. enter the at sign then the username in your tweet for them to know you speaking directly to them

Your Network is built from Followers and Following

Followers are people who choose to follow or subscribe to your stream of tweets. Your followers are your distribution reach.

Following are people whose tweets you want to follow or subscribe to.  These will show up on your home page and update immediately on a dashboard like homepage.

Direct Messages A way to privately send a tweet to someone else on Twitter. You do this by typing in d + username + message or using the reply icon on your direct message.

Hashtags/pound sign A way to aggregate an event or group that gives people a place to go to talk about the same thing. For example, #debate was a way to make any tweet about the debates as they were happening show up as a focused chat room discussion with other people on Twitter.

How Twitter can Help Grow A Small Business

• Build your personal or company brand
• Open doors to attention and engaging people on a 30 second attention span
• Have an immediate conversation with someone relevant within your market, your peers and your clients
• Increase Sales funnel and leads for your product and service line
• Consistently deliver chunk sized value to your market through your twitter followers
• Easy to get, store and respond to testimonials and feedback from your clients
• Network with your market

Next post we’ll look at how to build momentum and get Twitter off the ground for small business owners and entrepreneurs.

Social media is getting a lot of attention and traction as a way for businesses to better reach marketing and revenue goals in a whole new way. For business owners and executives who could use a primer on what’s so great about social media here’s a presentation that is a refreshingly honest look at what social media is, minus the hype. Title of the deck is ‘What the F$!k is Social Media?’ See what I mean about being blunt? It’s a nice change and makes me feel good about recommending it to my clients and readers. Enjoy!

After you’ve checked out the research on the shift to using social media as a way of better connecting and engaging your clients, leave a comment on what has meaning to your business.

Consumers expect a social media presence

The highlights of the 2008 Cone Business in Social Media Study came out recently. The results of the study point to a growing trend in how consumers want to be reached by businesses. The study found that 60% of American consumers use social media and of those more than half interact with businesses on social media websites.  93% of American consumers who use social media expect companies to have a social media presence and 85% of them believe those companies should be interacting with consumers through social media.

Cone Researchers say that the results mean that “Americans are eager to deepen their brand relationships through social media,” explains Mike Hollywood, director of new media for Cone, “it isn’t an intrusion into their lives, but rather a welcome channel for discussion.”

Use Social Media to Engage “Hard to Reach” Consumers

The 60% of the research who do use social media are the same markets many companies have a hard time marketing to with traditional advertising means. The consumers who use social media include men, the 18-34 year old market and affluent households (HHI of 75k and up).

“All of this is great news for marketers,” Hollywood explains. “Men and younger consumers are traditionally the most challenging to reach, while the highest income households are typically very desirable; here they are saying ‘Come market to us and interact with us online.’ This is really a license to put more energy and resources into this medium and do it effectively.”