Millions of people have heard of Twitter but not joined the conversation. Lots of them misunderstand that it is just another way of texting on smartphones. It is much more, and if you are in business, it can help you grow your business, increase brand awareness, and achieve other important goals. Here’s a very simple introduction to how to get started with the Twitter fun.
Go to Twitter.com and sign up for an account. Be careful to choose a name that makes sense – consider your own name or something easily remembered by others. Now you have an empty account, so you need to give it some life. Be sure to upload a photo for your Profile and give serious thought to your one-line bio. This will determine whether hundreds of people will find you interesting enough to follow or not. Once you’ve got all your Profile and Settings taken care of, it’s time to start posting – or as they’re often called, “tweets.”
Now a tweet or post is simply a short message or statement, no more than 140 characters, for others to read. Lots of people write about what they are doing, literally, like “I am sitting in traffic” or “Can’t wait for dinner with my honey” etc. That is all fine and good if you are being “followed” by close family members, but for others it will be booooooorrrrriiiiiing. Think about it – would you like to read about what some stranger is having for lunch, or where they are right now. “I am at Starbucks.” Well isn’t that special.
So if you want to get some positive results from Twitter, think of it as a way to build your brand. Create interesting messages that other people will learn from or gain in some way. Share your knowledge and expertise. Sure you can “go personal” at times talking about sports, the weather, a favorite meal or anything else. But the bulk of your content should be of interest and some small value to others.
How do you get people to subscribe to (follow) your posts (tweets)? First of all create some good content so when new people visit your Twitter page they see interesting stuff. Second, “follow” other people who seem interesting or maybe they are just live and work in your hometown.
There are two quick and easy ways to follow other people, and in turn many of them will reciprocate and follow you if your starting posts look interesting. The first is to use twellow.com, a “Twitter yellow pages” just like the name sounds. You can search for people by location, business category and other criteria. Twellow will produce a long list of Twitter users that fit your search criteria. You can click “follow” by their name and you’re off to building your network. In return many will follow you as well, so you are able to exchange messages or comments with each other.
Another great way to build your network is to hover your browser pointer over the names or faces on other people’s websites, and if they look interesting, click on their photo and visit their websites to see if you want to follow them. This is a fast way to find good twitterers worth following.
Finally consider more than one Twitter account if you have more than one email. (You can always use gmail, hotmail etc. as well as your other emails.) The reason for this is you might want to follow one group of people based on geography – they live in or near your city – and another group based on interest – they could be anywhere in the world. For example I follow Charlotte area people through my “charlottearea” account on Twitter, where I also post messages from CharlotteAreaNews.com; and I follow some of the top people in the country in the world of Internet marketing and other forms of marketing through my “BuckLawrimore” account. I also have 3 other Twitter accounts which I prefer to remain anonymouse. Each one follows a different set of people and sustains a different kind of conversation.
One more piece of advice – if you want to refer someone else to another web page with a long URL – so long it would take up a big hunk of your 140 character limit – copy the URL and paste it into a URL shortening service. Like a lot of other Twitter users, I use www.bit.ly (there is no .com afterwards – .ly stands for some country I don’t remember). You simply paste your long URL and bit.ly will shorten it into a much simpler URL which you can then share with others. In fact there’s a Twitter posting tool built into it.
So that’s it – easy to get started, great fun, a great way to stay connected with other people, learn from them and share ideas. Get involved and enjoy one of the great new networking tools of the 21st Century!