Twitter is a wonderful tool for business to communicate with its customers… The biggest constraint stopping small business from using it, is not understanding how it works.
As a communications device it is simply perfect. Twitter is thought of as hard to understand. This is due to the format, the format is simple, this is the reason that it is so perfect as a marketing tool!
I want to give you a few ‘pointers’ on how to use Twitter, I am going to say it again and I don’t get tired of saying this… BECAUSE YOU HAVE TO USE TWITTER!!! It’s free (currently), it allows you to talk to potentially millions of people in a single broadcast or Tweet and it is more importantly effective. Follow my simple rules and start using Twitter to promote your small business now!
What’s a tweet?
A ‘Tweet’ is when you send a message on Twitter – the sentence. Twitter only allows 140 characters, so ‘Tweets’ are short and have to be to the point. The 140 characters includes the characters of the sentence that you are communicating and the characters that you including with any links.
Who to follow on Twitter
The first thing you need to figure out is who to follow. This, more than anything else, will determine how useful Twitter becomes for you. Small Business should follow businesses that they work with, potential business that they want to work with and colleagues that they work with on a regular basis even competitors.
What makes Twitter most powerful for small business is following experts in your field and industry. To find useful people check directories such as ‘Twellow’. But the best method is to find a few industry experts and then look at their profile pages to see who they follow.
What is a re-tweet?
The ‘retweet’ is when a Twitter user re-post’s something interesting from another Twitter user.
Replies and mentions
A “reply” on Twitter is a direct response to a post from another user. To reply to somebody you start the reply with the @ symbol and then add the person’s Twitter username. The Twitter.com home page makes it easy to reply to a tweet by simply hovering over the response and then clicking ‘reply’. Similar to a reply is a ‘mention’, where you identify someone you mention by using their @username.
This in turn is turned into a link that can take you and others to that user’s Twitter profile.
Direct messages on Twitter
You can send a ‘direct message’ when you want to send a private message to somebody who has Tweeted you.
To do this go to the person’s Twitter profile page. Then, in the right column under Actions click the Message link -you can only send direct messages to people who follow you.
Hashtags (#)
Hashtags emphasise keywords. For example, #seo is a ‘hashtagged’ word. Hashtags are not case sensitive.
Searching by using a hashtag allows you to see all of the Twitter conservations that are happening around your requested topic. Another good means to identify people who talk about things that you want to listen too!
Posting links on Twitter
When you want to direct people to a blog post, a page of a website or a video for example you will want to post a link.
As Twitter limits you to 140 characters (and most URL’s could take up at least half of this space you need to reduce the size of the URL. There are two great sites to do this, Tiny URL and Bit.ly. This will reduce the longest URL to about 20 characters. These sites also provide some good analytical data so log on and start using them now.
Twitter on Mobile's
50% of all Twitter users view ‘Tweets’ from their mobile phone. Obviously you can send ‘Tweets’ from your phone. However, you need to use a good app to do this. Below I have listed some of the better apps available for the most common types of phone.
• iPhone: Tweetie, Twitterific, Birdfeed, Tweetdeck, Twitterfon
• BlackBerry: UberTwitter, Twibble, TwitterBerry, TinyTwitter
• Windows Mobile: Twikini, PockeTwit, TinyTwitter, Twobile
Posting photos on Twitter
You don’t always want to just send messages or standard links sometimes you will want to send images and pictures too. If you are not referencing a picture that already exists on the net, you should use a system called Twitpic.
Flickr has also has a similar service, called Flickr2Twitter. If you already have an active Flickr account, it makes sense to use Flickr (because all your mobile photos get added to your album), rather than creating a separate album on Twitpic.
Twitter is becoming more and more important in the social media landscape, with Google’s recent inclusion of Twitter and Facebook Live feeds with the search engine results who nows how big Twitter is going to be, but I can assure you it is going to be absolutely huge!
If you want to know more about the uses of social media please visit my website
https://www.internetmarketingstrategy.co.uk/social-media
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