From set up to Tweeting for your Business in 6 steps

Transcription

1 From set up to Tweeting for your Business in 6 steps Written by Simon Geraghty

2 Step 1: Sign up Step 2: Validation & Creation Go to and fill in: Your name : First & Last, or your company name (see step 5 below) Your address: an active address A password (as with anything else for security an alphanumeric password, a combination of letter and numbers wedding anniversary, the cat s birthday you name it). You are taken to a validation page where your name, address, password and username are checked for authenticity and availability. With 10 million active users it is likely that some combinations of your name are already in use, try using an underscore, your company initials or your own middle initials to identify you. This is where an accurate photo works well (see step 5 below) Now hit the button that says create my account

3 Step 3: The 60 second Tutorial You are taken through a 60 second tutorial. The first screen explains that a tweet is a message containing 140 characters, including spaces. Twitter s key strength is its use to disseminate information, opinions, jokes, facts, and to promote links and stories. To minimise the number of characters in a tweet, users will often use a tweet shortening service such as Bit.ly, Ow.ly or Goo.gl among others.

4 Step 4: Mr Follow Follow The next two screens you encounter explain that to get started you should start following people. Twitter gives you some suggestions to get you started; these are usually high profile users (Actors, singers and big companies). Who to follow? Who is your favourite actor, athlete, comedian, singer, or band? What about journalists, magazines, radio DJ s, bloggers, other businesses, particularly in your sector or target market? Look for your friends and colleagues. Follow other businesses in your vicinity Not everyone will follow you back but more on this later, follow the and they will follow you back as long as you aren t nuts! Note that every Twitter account can only follow up to 1,000 users per day; in addition, you can only follow 2,000 users in total. This follower cap differs from user to user and while not published it is generally based on your ratio of followers to following (1 follow: 1 follower is a good ratio while 100:1 is not). What do you do if you are capped? Look to gain more followers (see step 6 below). Finally, beware spam accounts and bots accounts that follow many but are followed back by few, have no picture, no description or something obviously spammy (typical text will discuss how to make millions today, are selling/ talking about themselves, have inappropriate content or only talk about their follower numbers).

5 Step 5: Your Bio This is where some time and effort is well spent. Some questions to ask at the outset: 1. Are you tweeting as an employee of your company or as a private individual? 2. Does your company have a social media policy? You can lock down your settings to private but if you want to promote your business, brand, products or services this is a barrier to others following you back in return. Now describe yourself and upload a photo, tell the world: Who are you? Where are you? What interests you? What else describes you? You should also put in your company website, your blog or your LinkedIn profile (depending on how you answered the first question above) Have a look someone else s profile once you are up and running and incorporate stuff you like from theirs, in terms of structure and the type of content.

6 Step 6: Now you re suckin diesel What to tweet about: Stop, listen & learn. Twitter is a fast moving, vibrant community of users. Take some time to follow interesting people and your friends who are there al ready and watch, read and learn from how they use twitter. You can also follow tweets by topic, for example searching for #MeetSmarter12, will show you all the tweets about the Meet Smarter event in June while #euroref gathers people s thoughts on the up-coming referendum. Yes, you can talk to Justin Bieber, LadyGaga or Barak Obama, but you are likely to be the 10,000th person that day to do so that day. You may not get a response to your extremely erudite and witty 140 character opus. Be interesting, inject your own personality, share stuff that interests you, promote your colleagues and other businesses in your area. Re-tweet interesting stuff around you (news, stories, help people out). Talk about you or your business, yes. Talk about what makes you / your business different and interesting to others, yes. But don't, I repeat don t, always talk about yourself. Avoid a stream of "me, me, me, blah, blah blah...!" Unfollowed. If people take the time to greet you, ask you a question or talk about you, take the time to answer them. Welcome your new followers. Remember that you may have 1000's of followers but not all will be online regularly. Be disciplined with your time and don t get sucked into the vortex. You can automate some stuff, but not so much that you come across as a bot (as in fully automated account); this defeats the 'Social' bit in the Social Media title. Happy tweeting! For more information, guidance or help mail info@dotdash.ie or tweet the team in MCI Dublin