How to use Twitter

What is Twitter

Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging platform created in march 2006. Twitter is a way of connecting people around the world by sending short messages called ‘tweets’. The social networking site is free and your ‘tweet’ is limited to 140 characters. The aim of twitter is to follow other people who have Twitter accounts and interact with them by sending ‘tweets’, and ‘retweeting’ messages.

Twitter for business

Twitter has 241 million active monthly users so this is a great way to promote your business products and services. To set up a Twitter account go to the following address www.twitter.com and follow the online instructions. For more help on how to set up a Twitter account, please download our free social media starter guide. Twitter can be used as a marketing tool to promote your services and like Facebook you will need to engage with your followers. Whether you are a B2B or B2C organisation, Twitter is great for getting your message across to potential customers.

Twitter Profile

A well maintained Twitter account will grab people’s attention, so start of with a great looking Twitter profile. Upload a profile picture to your Twitter account, this could either be of yourself or your company logo. Your profile description should include an overview of your products and services and also the location of your business. Upload a nice looking header image, this could be a photograph of your office or your team or you could even ask a graphic designer to design a professional looking design for you. Creating a nice looking, completed profile should help you to get more Twitter followers. Remember to tell people that you are on Twitter, post your link on Facebook, Google+ and Linkedin.

Tweets, Retweets and favourites

There are some Twitter phrases that you will need to know about; tweets, retweets and favourites.

Tweets

– A tweet is the short message that you post on your page. Your tweet is limited to 140 characters which can include links to other pages and images. So what sort of things should you tweet? Your tweets should include links back to your website/blog, tweets related to your business and maybe even a funny joke or cool quote. The idea is to get people to retweet your tweet.

Retweets

– Twitter is all about building relationships. To do this you will need to interact with other businesses, one way of doing this is to retweet a tweet from another business that you think your followers would find useful, this will hopefully encourage your followers to retweet your tweets.

Favourites

– Some tweets are made favourites for different reasons; the person reading the tweet may not have time to read the full article to which the tweet links to so they might make the tweet a favourite so that they can read later. Making someone’s tweet a favourite is a way of saying that you like the tweet and as Twitter does not have a ‘like’ button. Also, people may also favourite someone’s tweet to get the attention of the person tweeting, this could be a good tactic if you want to build a business relationship with this person.

Followers

When you set up a Twitter account, the first thing to do is to build up your followers as you you need people to tweet to. The Twitter accounts that you will want to follow are the ones that are associate with your business, local companies, competitors and potential customers.

Twitter lists

Lists are a way of organising your Twitter feed. You can create a list from Twitter and add your Twitter contacts to the list. The title of the list can be anything from Social media experts to movie critics.

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