OK, You’re on Twitter – Now What Do You Do?

So you’ve finally decided to set up a Twitter account for your business and now you are staring blankly at the Twitter website asking yourself what do I do next? Here are some tips and advice to help you and your business on Twitter.

Who to Follow?

Click on Who to Follow. There are three tabs to choose from – Suggestions, Browse Interests, and Find Friends. I recommend you use all three and find people who you want to follow. Suggestions on Who to Follow are what Twitter feels are good matches based on several factors such as: location, keywords in your profile description, and people you may already follow. Browse interests are high level topics. Twitter will show you suggestions in here as well for people to follow. These topics are very broad so if you can’t find your business niche I recommend using the search function within Browse Interests or the main search at the top of the Twitter page, or going to http://search.twitter.com. Find Friends grabs email addresses from your contacts and finds matches. This is a good place to start since you’ll know or at least be familiar with most of the people.

Here is the thing about following the right people: Follow people or other businesses that you can a) share information and converse with b) could be potential customers or are your current customers and clients c) learn from. Don’t get sucked into following for the sake of following and racking up your follow/following numbers. Growing your following list takes time, cultivation and a thought process. Social media is about engagement; or as Guy Kawasaki says “enchantment;” and making connections.

Profile
Couple of things to point here. You are limited to 160 characters to describe as much as possible about you or your business. So be efficient with your words. Secondly, change the default “egg” profile picture with one of your own. Personally, and I’m sure others feel the same way, if I see the default egg as your profile picture I’m not going to follow. Post a logo, a picture of you, storefront, something other than that egg. Think of it this way – your profile is your first impression to get someone to follow you.

Background
By default Twitter gives a few backgrounds to choose from. In addition you have the ability to upload an image background from your own computer. You can create a simple background image in an image editor like Photoshop Elements of Microsoft Paint. A custom background image enables you to brand your Twitter profile and adding further contact information that you weren’t able to put in your Profile description. There are lots of tutorials out there that show you how to create a background image for Twitter.

Get Your Tweet On!
So you’re starting to get real people following you, but what do you tweet about? There is a motto that I follow vehemently – “To thine own self be true.” Be true to who you are and what your business is about; don’t pretend to be someone you are not. If you are selling apples don’t tweet about oranges. Here are my recommendations:

• Tweet about your business – this could be blog articles, press releases, new clients, customer service improvements, etc.
• Communicate with your clients or customers
• Tweet about news items that are going on in your niche that others that follow you will find interesting and useful
• Ask questions of your followers

This small list is to just to get you started tweeting in the right direction and helping your business grow.

Automation
Twittering shouldn’t be a full time position! You have a real life too! A business to run, articles to write, and spending time with the family. Fortunately there are some very useful tools out there that can help automate your tweets, find the right one for your needs. With an automation tool you can queue up your tweets and space out the time of each that gets posted to Twitter. This will free up your time to concentrate on your business and family. However, you will need to spend some time responding to tweets that mention you, re-tweeted your tweets or other messages that you received. These responses should receive a personal message rather than automation.

What are your thoughts on Twitter? Do you think it is useful for business?