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.