Twitter is one of those social networking tools that has the potential to drive traffic to your website. It is a platform that easily connects you to people on a global scale. In the past Twitter generated loads of business for me, it landed me the opportunity to host my own radio talk show, which I no longer do by choice. Twitter has also connected me to influential people which I prefer not to mention in this blog post.
The confusing thing about Twitter when you first sign up is how it functions and one doesn’t really know what to do with Twitter unless you’ve been shown. The secret in using Twitter effectively is the tools that were created for using Twitter. Tools such as Hootsuite, Seasmic, Tweetdeck, Buffer, Tweepi and many more. Here are some recommended important steps to take to help you get started with Twitter.
The most important first step is to complete your profile
If your primary motive is to use Twitter for your business you should include in your profile section keywords that let people know what you are going to tweet about.
The next step is to feed your stream with content
Before you go out and find people to follow I would recommend that you post a few tweets and include quality content to your Twitter stream. What you post in your Twitter stream depends on what you will be using Twitter for. Make a list of what you can possibly Tweet about related to your business. The reason why you want to do this is to prevent people from mistaking you as a potential spammer. Or to prevent you from being seen as someone who cannot be trusted. Adding content to your stream also gives people an idea of who you are.
Here are some ideas:
- Feed your blog posts to Twitter when they are published and circulate them regularly.
- Feed industry or business related blog posts of websites you think your audience would find interesting.
- Post your products to promote your products.
- Post events you attend or maybe post events your customers might find interesting to attend.
- Create and develop your own content and feed it to Twitter.
The most popular Twitter accounts all ask questions, seek opinions, give advice and recommend things to their followers.
How many times should I post?
You can post as many times as you want to on Twitter. The more you tweet the better because of how Twitter works. Twitter is a constant live stream and on average there is about 6000 tweets happening every second of every day. If you are posting just once a day you would be wasting your time, so look at posting something every 30 minutes or post something every hour.
Finding Followers
Twitter is one of those social networks that is dependent on you following someone in order to gain followers. So the task is to get out there and find followers. There are a few ways you can find people to follow:
- Log into your Twitter account and find the followers of competitors in your industry and follow them. You can also use specialised following services to help you find these followers.
- Follow all your customers and all your suppliers.
- You can use search.twitter.com to help you find followers by key words.
- Sign up to Twellow which is Twitter’s Yellow Pages and find followers there.
- Ask people to follow you in your newsletters, emails, flyers, when published somewhere.
- Retweet other Tweeters content you find interesting.
- Start conversations with other people by responding to their tweets.
- Run competitions, here are some ideas from Jeff Bullas Site
And then sign up to a tool like Hootsuite
This tool will help you monitor conversations, help you to schedule content, help you to connect with other people. Hootsuite does a lot more than the things I’ve mentioned. This is one of the most popular tools but you can use other tools I’ve mentioned earlier. This one for me personally is the only tool that gives you that almost all in one product solution but I still have to use other tools to achieve the results I want.
There is lots more you can do with Twitter I’ve just shared some of the very basic next step to take when it comes to using Twitter that I hope will give you a better idea of how to get started on Twitter. I offer one to one personalised Twitter training if this is something you would like.
Romany Thresher