How to use Twitter
Business Coaching Quotes
from local business coaches
Here at Service Central we’ve been using Twitter for a couple of years now. We’ve built up over 8,000 followers across our various Twitter accounts, and have generated some good quality business as a result of our efforts on Twitter.
Interest around Twitter is building every day, and its rare that a day goes past without friends, family and business associates asking me questions such as:
- How do I get on Twitter?
- What do I write?
- How do I get followers?
- Does Twitter work for business?
- What expectations should I have?
Rather than answering these questions time and time again I thought its easiest to give you all of these answers in one handy place. So here goes...
How do I get on Twitter?
It couldn’t be easier. Its completely free and takes just a minute or two of your time.
Simply head to www.twitter.com and fill in the “New to Twitter” form on their homepage (Full Name, Email and Password) and click on the Signup button.
It will take you to the next page where you can choose your Username. The Username is very important as this will be your publicly facing Twitter account name and will form part of your personal Twitter URL, so please try to choose one that best describes you or your business.
Once you’ve set up your account, Twitter will then take you through a basic course that helps you set up your Twitter account including how to tweet, how to follow people, inviting people to follow you via your email account, etc.
Once you have gone through these steps you’re then in your actual Twitter account and effectively left to your own devices. I would very much recommend that you click on your Username in top right hand corner, then click on Settings, and then select the Profile Tab.
Within the Profile Tab you can upload your own personal photo (or logo if you are a business), put in a link to your website, and write a little Bio about yourself. Completing this is very important when it comes to building your image and brand on Twitter.
What do I write?
Twitter is what they call a “micro-blogging” platform. That means that you’re writing public blog posts onto the internet that anyone can read and follow. The “micro” part of that is that you’re limited to just 140 characters. Yep, you have just 140 characters to get your message across. This is 20 characters less than a normal SMS message, so as you can imagine it is quite limiting.
The 140 character limit forces you to be brief and to the point. One way to think about your tweets (tweets are what people call your posts on twitter) is that you’re writing newspaper headlines, you’ve got a small number of characters to attract people’s attention and get them to do something. Most times you put in a link to a website or blog where they can read more. Twitter automatically shortens the link for you so that you don’t use up too many of your 140 characters. For example, one of our recent tweets is:
Pros and Cons of different gutters: http://ht.ly/3Xgur #plumber #plumbing #gutter #gutters #guttering #build #building #homeimprovement”
To break this down, this tweet has a heading designed to be interesting to our followers, namely “Pros and Cons of different gutters”. It then provides you with a link to the full article on what are the actual pro’s and cons of different gutters. In this case this is an article that we have written on our blog. This tweet then has a number of “Hashtags” that help categorise this tweet and what it is related to.
Including Hashtags in your tweets can be super powerful in building up your following and the effectiveness of your tweets. By simply putting a # at the start of words in your tweet, you can:
- Help people understand what your tweet is about or related to.
- Instantly make your tweet appear in searches people make on Twitter under those terms.
- Join in real conversations (i.e. There are ongoing conversations around Hashtags such as #quanda #weather #beiber etc).
- Instantly create links to a list of similar tweets (i.e. If you put #beiber in your tweet it will create a blue link through to everyone else who has included #beiber in their tweets).
- Ok, this list is getting long, I’m only just starting. Let’s leave it at that for the moment.
Have I answered the actual question? So, “what do you write”? The answer is whatever you feel like, you can write what interests you, links to interesting information/pictures/articles, interesting insights, complaints, whatever you choose.
A great tool for writing your tweets is Hootsuite.
Hootsuite enables you to write your tweets in bulk and schedule when they are set to go out. This is great way to make your time on Twitter is effective. Rather than having to log into Twitter throughout the day, you can set up all of your tweets for the day/week in one go and schedule them to go out whenever you wish.
How do I get followers?
Writing away on Twitter really isn’t that much fun unless people are actually there to read what you have written. So lets find a way to get you a few followers...
Firstly, its best to let all of your friends, family and associates know that you are on Twitter and encourage them to follow you. What you want them to do is go to your Twitter profile and click on the Follow button. The address of your Twitter profile is http://twitter.com/username so in our case our username is servicecentralz so our Twitter address is http://twitter.com/servicecentralz . You take that address (or url) and email it to everyone that you know. Its best to write a personalised email to everyone letting them know that you’ve joined Twitter, why you joined and what you’re going to be tweeting about. Hopefully you interest them and they decide to follow you.
If you have a webmail account such as Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo Mail you can also use Twitter's tools to instantly send an invitation to follow you on Twitter to all of your contacts stored in those accounts.
Secondly, one of the best tactics to get followers on Twitter is to actually follow them first. Most people on Twitter like to follow people who follow them. So head to their Twitter profile page and click on Follow.
So how do you find who to follow? Well if you know who you want to follow then you can do a search for them using Twitter’s search box. However, often you down know who to follow. In our case we often look for Competitors and people interested in Home Improvement, from there we look at who is following them and then go and follow their followers.
Another great tool is Twitter lists. Avid Twitter users often create lists categorising people into Businesses, Real Estate Agents, Journalists, etc. You can find these lists on their profile, and then follow the people on their lists.
Twitter really doesn’t like it if you follow too many people without having too many people follow you back. To stop this they put limits on how many people you can follow per day, and there is an overall limit of 2,000 people that you can follow. This limit stays in place until you have over 2,000 people actively following your account. To overcome this issue you can use http://www.justunfollow.com/ to find people who haven’t followed you back and unfollow them.
Thirdly, you should promote your twitter address broadly. Some of the places you might consider putting it include:
- Website
- Email signature
- Business cards
- Signage
- Facebook Profile / Company Page
- Linkedin Profile
- Advertisements
I’m not too sure if its worth doing or not, however another service to generate more Twitter followers is http://twiends.com/
Does Twitter work for Business?
The quick answer is Yes. The real answer is “Yes, after a fair bit of work”.
Twitter is an amazing networking tool. Its a great way to connect with likeminded people that you would never meet with in the real world. Since starting on Twitter around two years ago, I have generated hundreds of job requests for www.servicecentral.com.au, met an amazing business contact after I tweeted late last year “I’m looking to meet amazing people with great ideas”, connected with lots of new people including a number of face to face meetings, developed a stronger raport with a number of people I already know, and (my favourite) been stopped by a random motorbike rider whilst driving along (in my Service Central branded car) who pulled up beside me and said quite excitedly “I follow you on Twitter!!!”.
I have also seen our tweets, links and articles tweeted and retweeted throughout the world.
Actually, that leads me to an important point, to make Twitter really work for you and your business you need to really familiarise yourself with how to engage with the Twitter tools. I know that I’ve already given you a lot to learn, however …. wait there’s more!
To engage with others inside the “twitterverse” here are some common actions:
- Retweet: You click on the retweet button to communicate someone else’s tweets to all of your followers.
- @ message: If you write a tweet and put @someones-username (i.e. @servicecentralz ) in your tweet then your tweet will appear in their timeline and they will be notified. This can be a great way to have an open communication with someone. It can also be a great way to complain, personally I love giving @qantasairways a tweet when a plane is not running on time. It is like writing on someones facebook wall where everyone can see what you have written.
- Direct Message: If you don’t want to have an open conversation that everyone can see, then you can use the Direct Messaging (DM) functionality. This sends your follower a private message.
What expectations should I have?
You get what you pay for. Twitter is a free service and it comes with no guarantees. That said, the more you put into it the more you can get out of it.
Over the last two years I’ve personally spent over two months of full time work (1 hour here, half hour there) on getting our twitter accounts to where they are now. In the early days this felt like an absolute waste of time, however now I’m starting to see some benefits.
If you have a lot of time on your hands, go for it!
I would love it if you followed us on Twitter. Our accounts are:
Business Coaching Quotes
from local business coaches
