Tips for using Twitter to boost your business

Tell the world what you’re doing in 140 characters. Sounds pretty silly and not the type of tool that would be good for business! However, by allowing you to do just that, Twitter has become the fastest growing social networking site in the world, and a great place to promote yourself and your business.

Twitter is a free social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to post text messages of up to 140 characters in answer to the question “What are you doing?” These messages are known as tweets and can be read by people who ‘follow’ you. You can make your tweets private or allow anyone who clicks on your profile to read them.

This video explains Twitter – in plain English!

Some people do actually tweet about what they are doing, but the business savvy are using Twitter to share ideas, gain a profile and drive business their way. Here are a few tips on getting started and using Twitter to boost your business.

Getting Started

Start a free  account by going to Twitter and clicking on the ‘Sign up now’ button. Follow the prompts to fill in your details and you’ll be tweeting within minutes. Say hello to the world from your new Twitter account (not that anyone will probably read it just yet!)

Finding Followers

Now you need someone to read your words of wisdom. The best way to find followers is to start following other people. If you know someone who tweets, go to their profile page and click the ‘Follow’ button just under their name. They’ll receive a message that you’re following them and they can choose whether to accept your follow or not. Often people you follow will follow you back – but only if you’re tweeting something of interest.

If you don’t know anyone on Twitter, there are a few ways of finding interesting people. You can use the search function on your Home page for words of interest to you and your business. This will return anyone who has tweeted those words recently. However this can return an overwhelming number of results, so I recommend one of the following.

Twellow and Just Tweet It are directories of public Twitter accounts, with hundreds of categories and search features to help you find people. Type a word of interest into the search and they’ll give you a list with the most prolific tweeters at the top. Click through to their profile and see if they are worth following.

Once you’ve found a couple of people to follow, go to their profiles and see who they follow – you’ll probably want to add some of these people to your list. Within no time you’ll be building up your network.

What to Tweet

Unless you’re a celebrity, no-one will really be interested in what you’re doing at any point in time. Use your tweets to share resources and ideas to become a person others see as knowledgeable and generous. Do NOT start tweeting by immediately trying to sell or promote your own products or services – this will turn most people off and they won’t follow you. Try to get a balance of sharing other resources and ideas along with promoting your own stuff.

Check Twitter daily if you can and try to get a balance between tweeting too much and too little. Once a week is definitely too little and once a minute is too much! Happy tweeting.

10 Tips

Here are 10 tips for using Twitter effectively:

1. Fill out your profile and add a link to your website before you start tweeting and following other people.
2. Add a photo or logo before you go live – people want to know who you are.
3. Choose some keywords that describe your business and put them in your profile – this will get you a higher ranking in the search engines.
4. Don’t follow anyone until you’ve posted a few interesting tweets.
5. Check who is following you – if you don’t like the look of them (or their tweets) block them.
6. Try to respond to people who follow you with a ‘nice to be in your network’ type message.
7. Don’t just push your own products or services – be generous and share resources and ideas you find.
8. Share a little personal information in your tweets so people see your human side.
9. Comment on other’s tweets and retweet what other’s have posted (with acknowledgement).
10. You don’t have to read every tweet made by people you follow.

This article was recently published in Working Women.