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How To Use Twitter To Build Your Business – Part 1 February 10, 2015
Because this post is going to be very, very, very long…I decided to split it into two parts. In this first part I will discuss and show: - Twitter Basics - Setting Up Your Account - Tracking Trends And Traffic On Twitter
The second part will be about: - Using Twitter For Business - Incorporating Media - How To Use Twitter Groups - Building Your Twitter Network - Twitter Marketing Plan As a disclaimer: I’m not the biggest expert on Twitter, so what I will share in this posts is what I learned and what works for me so far. Enjoy
How To Use Twitter To Build Your Business PART ONE: TWITTER BASICS
How Twitter Can Benefit Your Business
At first glance, it seems silly that an instant messaging site such as Twitter can help grow your business. To truly appreciate how Twitter can market a brand so much better than say, doing a slew of cold calls or a flurry of press releases, we first need to look at how the landscape of marketing and doing business has changed with the coming of social media such as Twitter.
As late as a decade ago, businesses employed the use of brilliantly written press releases, flashy ad campaigns, and email databases, but today it takes more than that to truly engage prospective customers. For one thing, because of the influx of information online, users know a hard-sell campaign when they see one. Technology has also crafted things like email filters and caller ID so it’s easier to avoid any hard-selling. Users are more apt to pick and choose what they want. They don’t want to be told what to buy; they are allergic to people trying to sell them something.
Social media has encouraged people to share their experiences. For instance, a person now is more likely to post a message on a content-sharing site asking for dry cleaner recommendations, rather than look at a phone book for the service. Blogs, too, are important sources of personal experiences.
Therefore, to successfully grow a business means an important shift in perspective and in the tools used to bring your message across. This shift is called inbound marketing, where instead of businesses pushing a message out, they instead craft content to lure prospective customers in.
Twitter can do exactly that. It’s a gold mine to engage customers. Many businesses use Twitter not as a means to push a product or service, but to share more about the “behind the scenes” of the company and the people who work in it. It allows a brand to have a face and a personality, and people always connect more with someone they
feel they personally know. With the sharing of experiences comes creating connections between the brand and customer. And Twitter, when utilizing its 140-character charm properly, can create powerful connections and engagement.
What is Twitter? There are many definitions of what Twitter is: - a microblogging site/tool - an instant messaging service made public - a powerful social network Twitter is all of these, set in an interface where its users can send and receive 140-character-or-less messages publicly to several people at once or to a specific person.
Much of Twitter’s power as a social network comes from its ability to connect with a variety of mobile devices and websites, and how it plays well with third-party applications. All of this allows Twitter to be a useful tool for sharing and spreading information quickly and to a lot of people.
Get your Twitter Marketing under control in 2015 with this daily step-by-step checklist Download your FREE Twitter Marketing Checklist
Twitter Vocabulary To make navigating around Twitter easier, it’s best to bone up on the common and usual Twitter terms or “Twerminology” as it’s often referred to:
@ Coupled with someone’s username, this is the equivalent of calling out to someone in Twitter. Putting the @ sign next to someone’s username links directly to their profile and gets their attention.
Avatar The small image of yourself shown beside your username in your Twitter profile. Your avatar appears beside every tweet you send.
Bio Located underneath your username in your Twitter profile,
this is a short description of who you are or what you do.
Block Means to disallow someone from seeing your tweets in your twitter feed. Blocked users also cannot follow you or add you to lists.
Direct Message (DM) If you and another Twitter user follow each other, you can send each other messages directly that can only be read by sender and recipient. To send a DM, type “d twitter username” (e.g., d twitter)
Favorite Users can highlight the star beside a tweet to add it to their favorites, which bookmarks the tweet so you can find it easily.
#FF A hashtag that means “Follow Friday,” every Friday Twitter users suggest users worth following by adding this hashtag followed by the suggested username, e.g. “#FF @twitter”
Find People Twitter’s search function that allows users to search for friends or other users of the same interests
Follow Means to subscribe to a user’s Twitter feed/updates/tweets. In order to read a user’s tweets from your own Twitter page, you must follow the user. To send them a Direct Message, you both must follow each other. You can follow specific users by going to their Twitter profile pages (http://twitter.com/#!/USERNAME) and clicking the Follow button.
Following Is the number of people you follow on Twitter.
Followers Is the number of people who follow you on Twitter. These people can see your Twitter stream/updates.
Geotagging Is when your location is included in your Tweet. You can check/uncheck the box that allows this in your Twitter settings.
GFF (Get Followers Fast) These are sites that offer to get you more followers. Avoid these as you’re required to provide your username and password—whereupon these sites will spam your followers using your account.
Handle is a user’s Twitter username, selected during the sign-up process to Twitter.
Hashtag is the # sign followed by keywords or a specific topic. Hashtags can be inserted into a tweet and serve as a tagging system within Twitter, for tweets that discuss a particular topic. This makes it easier for users to follow a particular topic.
Lists Are groups of other Twitter users. Using lists is a way to organize or tie together specific followers of your account into a group. More on lists later.
Mention Is the act of referring to another Twitter user in your Tweet, by adding the @ sign followed by their username. Other users in turn can mention you in their tweets the same way. Mentions usually happen when you are replying or forwarding a tweet to other users.
Promoted Tweets These are paid Tweets that show up as top search results in Twitter
Protected/Private Accounts This is an option for Twitter users so only their approved followers can view their Tweets. By default, all Twitter Profiles are public.
Reply A Tweet sent to answer another user’s. A reply always begins with @USERNAME (the user who had previously sent the message).
Retweet (RT) Is a Tweet by another user that was forwarded to you or that you forward to your other followers. Also used to indicate the action of retweeting a Tweet. RTs are often used to spread news.
Suspended These are accounts marked by Twitter to have breached their Terms of Service. A common reason for suspension is the use of an account to spread spam messages.
Trending Topic A topic or keyword (usually in the form of hashtags) that is the most popular among Twitter users. These continually change in real-time.
Tweet Can refer to the act of posting a Tweet, or message on Twitter that consists of 140 characters or less; also can refer to the actual message sent.
Tweeter Another name for a Twitter user or Twitter account holder.
Unfollow To unsubscribe from a Twitter user’s stream or tweets. Their tweets will no longer show up in your home page timeline.
Username Known also as one’s Twitter handle or account name. It identifies whoever is tweeting, being replied to, or mentioned in a Twitter stream. When you sign up, Twitter usernames must be 15 characters or less.
How To Use Twitter To Build Your Business PART TWO: SETTING UP YOUR ACCOUNT
1. Sign Up! To start with, go to http://www.twitter.com/signup. Here you’ll find the signup page where you’ll be asked to give for your full name, a username, and a password. The username you pick will become your Twitter handle.
Note: You username is absolutely important! Think of it as your online business card. It’s your personal
brand and how people will identify you on Twitter. Choose one that’s easy to remember and is unique to you.
Ex. (yourname) JamesWalker, JayWalker (yournameyourbusiness) JayWalkerMD, JWalkerArch, JWBrewers
Making your username your name lets people feel they’re talking to a real person, not someone hiding behind an alias or a business.
In case your name’s already taken, Twitter will give you some suggestions. But don’t pick ones with numbers at the end of your username (like Hazel9030); it simply looks lazy and random. Don’t use underscores either, as it’s just not done in the Twitter community. Pick a username that’s simple and easy to remember.
Note: If you want to, you can set up a twitter account for your business or your company! It works nearly exactly the same for a personal account. The difference is that you’ll be representing your entire company, so your username, profile and picture should be connected to it.
After entering your name, username and password, click “Create My Account” to get started!
2. Customizing your Account
After signing up, you’ll immediately get the option to start following people. Before you do that, we suggest fixing up your account first to make it look appealing. A great looking profile will make it easier to attract followers. Nobody wants to follow an account with an empty profile and a blank picture. Your profile reflects who you are and what you do. To start with, click the Edit your profile link under your username. To access your profile directly, just enter http://www.twitter.com/*yourusername* (enter your username at the end).
Your Avatar Next to your username, this is what’s going to identify you in Twitter, so it’s vital to make it a good one. You’ll want your best smiling face there :), or if it’s your company, use your own logo. If you want to take a good picture of yourself first, feel free to do so.
Next are other important portions of your profile:
Your real name – unless you’re planning something illegal or illicit, make sure you use your own. After all, you want to be recognized as a real person and do real business dealings.
Your location – this can be a talking point for you and your prospects, so fill it out as well.
Your site – you need to mention this to drive people to your site. You’ll want your blog, your company or business site, or any other place of interest.
Your bio – You only have 160 characters for this section, so you have to be direct to the point while still being interesting. Talk about yourself—your company, your interests, your hobbies, your goals, your achievements, things that make you uniquely you. You’re not out to make a sales page with your profile, but to introduce yourself as a regular, genuine person.
Once you’re done, click Save.
Your Background Design To get to Design tab you need to click on your small photo next to search, then click Settings.
The Design tab allows you to customize your Profile page’s background and colors. Here you can score extra points with viewers by making your profile creative and attractive. Whatever you choose, make sure that it shows something good about you. A bland, uninteresting background, like the one you start out with, will make followers think you’re much the same. On the other hand, a cluttered background seems unprofessional and may look too much like you’re selling something. Aim for a happy medium—simple, clean, and shows exactly who you are or what your business is.
Here are some pointers for designing the right background:
Mind your head—Make sure that the Twitter toolbar, located at the top of the screen, does NOT obscure anything important on your background.
Adjust for screen size—Keep in mind that in this day and age, people will be viewing your page on a variety of screen sizes, including cellphone screens. Design your background so that there’s less chance of the sides getting cut off in case it’s being viewed through a small monitor.
Do NOT use Tile—which is to say, don’t allow the image to replicate across the screen, which will make it look cluttered and difficult to read.
You may use tools like Canva to create the right background image, or hire a professional to do it for you. After all, this is a business you’ll be marketing, so you might as well do it right.
To add your own ready-made background, click the “Change Background” dropdown button and select the “Choose existing image” to upload your custom background image. Note that it can only be smaller then 2mb in size and either GIF, JPG or PNG file.
Note: You may also add your mobile phone number to your Twitter account so you can stay in touch
while away from your computer. Simply click on the Mobile tab on your navigation bar. From here you can enter your country and your phone number. Leave the check mark on “Let others find me by phone” to maximize this feature.
Just remember to use Twitter only at appropriate times. No tweeting in movie theaters and during important meetings!
Get your Twitter Marketing under control in 2015 with this daily step-by-step checklist Download your FREE Twitter Marketing Checklist PDF
3. Start Tweeting! Now that you’re all set, it’s time to have some fun! You probably want to start following people, but start by posting a few messages of your own. This is important because once you start following, people will be checking out your own profile. Generally, people will read ten or twenty of your tweets before they decide whether or not to follow you, so you ought to have that number of tweets out before you start looking for Tweeps to follow.
But what do you write about?
What’s going on with YOU—what you’re doing now, or what you’re thinking or feeling at the moment.
What’s entertaining you—the movie or video you just saw, or something you’re reading
What interests you—talk about your hobbies: gardening, writing, collecting comics, and so on.
What you know—tips, how-tos, observations, can be useful.
Where you are—the café you’re hanging out in or the event you’re attending
What you’re writing about—post the link to your blog or even to your video. A great way to market your business.
What someone else said—you can retweet other people’s posts by clicking the Retweet button or by typing either RT or Retweet before your message.
Keep in mind that unless you made your account private, anyone can read what you’re posting. You want to be seen in the best light possible. Tweet about things that will be useful and will catch people’s interest, and share a little about yourself so other people get to know you better.
4. Find Targeted Tweeple OK, now you ought to find people to follow on Twitter. When you follow someone, you can automatically read their posts on Twitter, and when they follow you, they become the audience for your updates.
Following people on Twitter is a great strategy because many people have set their accounts to automatically follow those who follow them. Even if this doesn’t happen at once, they can end up following you later on if you manage to engage their interest.
First note that it’s not going to happen all at once; you have to be patient in building up your network.
So how do you find people to follow?
I. Use Twitter’s own search engine. The easiest thing to do is to follow people you know who are already on Twitter. So click on the search engine on the top navigation bar to search for friends, family, co-workers, anyone you know who’s on Twitter also. We’ll talk more about this tool later.
II. Use the Who to Follow tool. This feature lets you choose people to follow based on your own search terms. You can choose certain topics and follow interesting people connected to them.
You may also find friends who may already be on Twitter. You can use to find your contacts through a variety of applications. Just click on the Find Friends tab on your profile page from the Who to Follow page. III. Use third-party tools. They’re easy to use, they’re effective, and they’re free! Twellow is the yellow pages of Twitter, where you can look up people based on their industry, field, or company. We’ll cover other tools you can use in another chapter of this e-book. IV. Leverage on other people’s networks. That is to say, you can follow people your followers know. After all, it’s only one degree of separation, so they may follow you too! V. Gather Twitter names from the people you meet. Simply ask them if they’re on Twitter too, and note down their handles. This is a great thing to do when in parties, events, or after business meetings. VI. Find Twitter leaders and follow their followers. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. There already are leaders for your industry out there and they have tons of followers with the same interests as you. VII. Follow other network marketing leaders. Apart from being popular, these people may have great techniques you can use, so pay attention to what they do on Twitter.
Once you have followers, it’s important to keep engaging them with new tweets. We’ll get deeper into how to get others to follow you in the next few parts.
How To Use Twitter To Build Your Business
PART THREE: TRACKING TRENDS AND TRAFFIC ON TWITTER
So far we’ve tackled the whys and hows of using Twitter. It has been mentioned as an integral tool in building a network and business. Here we discuss how Twitter can get you relevant information about your intended audience, promising and qualified leads, and even tracked trends that are important to you business.
Understanding the Hashtag If you’ll recall, a hashtag (marked by the symbol “#”) is Twitter’s tagging system—it’s how Twitter users organize and categorize various tweets and topics because a hashtag is a keyword that is searchable throughout Twitter. Every tweet that uses the same hashtag will come up in a search of that particular hashtag. A hashtag is important for organizing information on events, trends, and news. Many also use hashtags to track participants in online games or promotions. When used properly, hashtags are a very big help in network marketing, as it extensively uses the Twitter network to spread information.
Here are a few basic tips when using hashtags: a. Depending on what you are tweeting, you can incorporate hashtags within your tweet:
Otherwise, you can end your tweet with a hashtag.
b. Hashtags don’t recognize symbols or spaces—if your hashtag contains more than one word, type it out without spaces. If this becomes confusing, you can also try capitalizing the first letter of each word: #WebMarketing. c. Your tweet should be relevant to your hashtag. Doing otherwise is considered spam. This also doesn’t mean, however, that every tweet you make must have a hashtag. Use it only when you think it’s necessary. d. The characters in your hashtag count towards the 140-character limit of Twitter, so don’t suddenly decide to fill each tweet you make with hashtags.
e. You can track your own hashtags using www.hashtag.org—see how popular particular topics are, how often they are retweeted, etc. There are also other applications such as Twitterfall (http://twitterfall.com) and TweetChat (http://tweetchat.com) that do real-time tracking.
Using Twitter Search A very powerful—and free—resource to tracking trends and traffic in Twitter is its own Search function. Even using the simple search bar built into the Twitter homepage can yield important information you can use in your business or market research. Twitter also allows users to save specific searches, so you can file this information away for when you need to do market research.
Here are some handy ways and tips where the Twitter Search Function (the basic or advanced) can be a prime marketing resource. a. We’ve discussed the importance of hashtags in consolidating and aggregating tweets discussing a similar topic, event, or item. The most popular hashtags are recorded under the Trends header in your Twitter sidebar. If you wanted to get a real-time cross-section of the buzz of a particular hashtag, simply type it in the search bar and hit Enter.
b. Besides the obvious search for mentions of your company (either by searching your company’s Twitter username or any mentions of it in tweets), also look at common industry terms and phrases. If you want to search for exact terms, enclose your phrase in quotation marks. Example:
Then you can check out the profile pages of the users that come up. This is a sweat-free way to find possible prospects or leads. c. Search for mentions and hashtags of your competitors; you can even search for specific locations and get a small picture of how a brand has penetrated the market. d. If you want to avoid any retweeted (RT) tweets and just get tweets that have your specified keywords, you can add –RT. Actually, using the minus (-) sign then a word you don’t want in your search results will filter it out. e. On the other hand, searching for RTs of a keyword can let you know how viral the topic is in the Twitter
universe. You may want to check this once in a while. f. The Twitter Search Function is fun and unique in that you can even search for tweets using popular emoticons—those faces created by various symbols. For instance, searching for a keyword plus the emoticon :) or :( will bring up tweets that reveal how people feel about the topic. Likewise, in the advanced Search there are checkboxes if you want results that are negative or positive in tone.
Tracking Twitter Habits We’ve been saying over and over on how Twitter is a valuable tool and resource in marketing your business and expanding your network. The power of Twitter isn’t just hearsay—if you want to see accurate, solid, facts about your Twitter activities and genuine results, here are some applications and services you can use to track your Twitter Habits and discover how you—and others—behave in the land of 140 characters:
TweetStats (http://tweetstats.com/) This handy little application can chart your number of tweets (even down to how many an hour!), who you tweet to the most, and other fun bits about your Twitter behavior.
TwitterCounter (http://twittercounter.com) This is the ideal resource to find out how much you tweet and compare it to the number of new followers you get in a given time period. You can also monitor certain statistics of your followers—and it’s all displayed in a clean line graph.
TwitterPoster (http://twitterposter.com), Klout (http://klout.com) Both of these monitor who of the millions of Twitter users are the most influential. Whereas the former is a fun, visual representation of whom the influencers are, Klout uses over 30 different variables to compute your influential score. It takes into account criteria such as the number of your engaged audience, how likely people will retweet your messages, and the influence level of your audience itself makes it a fairly accurate tool.
Twitturly (http://twitturly.com/)
This tracks the top 100 URLs that get tweeted in real-time. Every time a URL is mentioned, twitturly logs it into its databank and tracks mentions and retweets.
TweetBuzzer (http://tweetbuzzer.com) Want to know how your brand is faring in the Twitter universe? Track its rank in terms of who mention it in tweets, in real-time. This site also has a Top 100 list of the most-mentioned brands. That’s it for the Part One Watch out for part two of this post where I will discuss: - Using Twitter For Business - Incorporating Media - How To Use Twitter Groups - Building Your Twitter Network - Twitter Marketing Plan Get your Twitter Marketing under control in 2015 with this daily step-by-step checklist Download your FREE Twitter Marketing Checklist Share this post and help spread the love!
Vahagn Aris