Not too long ago Twitter was viewed by many of its non-adherents as a petty playground for the chattering classes. Admittedly the name didn't help matters, but over the last few years Twitter has morphed into a social media Super Power with a remarkable source of discussions and an opportunities for businesses and individuals to tap into. It’s a serious medium and can do you a lot of good, so here are ten little tips for businesses who may be playing Twitter catch-up in 2013.
1.You Need To Be On It
Whilst anyone can view and search for people’s tweets on the internet (as long as the tweeting account is not private), to be able to post personal messages and reply to other people’s, as well as to take advantage of the many Twitter tools, you’ll need an account. You can create one in your business’s name or in a personal capacity; once they're set up you can (if you want) link the account to your Facebook page for additional Tweet exposure. Don't forget to add a brief bio mentioning what you're about, where you are, and place a link to your website. With this done your basic Twitter account is ready!
2. Learn The Lingo
Social media's ever growing lexicon isn't too difficult to get to grips with, and a lot of it passes from format to format. However, Twitter specific terminolgy is vital to grasp in order to get the most out of the tool. You “tweet” (verb) a “tweet” (noun). If someone you’re following says something interesting, you can “retweet” it, which means everyone following you will see the message. If you like a tweet, you can “favourite” it, which means it’ll go into your "Favourites" list and the tweeter will get kudos. The now fabaled # (hashtag) is utterly vital for Tweeting success, too. Include it within Tweets to curate your messages towards intended audiences, e.g. "The latest #business news right here."
3. Learn The Abbreviations
You’ll soon notice some messages have funny abbreviations at the start. RT means retweet, and is added automatically, although some mobile apps remove the letters RT to cut out clutter. MT is a RT that has been manually modified, perhaps to make it fit in the 140 character limit; the MT must be typed manually. Twitter names at the start of a tweet signify that tweet is a reply to that person’s tweet. Clicking on the “details” link will reveal more of the conversation. If you reply directly to X, only people following both you and X will see the tweet, unless you move the username from the start of the tweet (which is often done by inserting a dot), whereupon all your followers will see it.
4. Learn To Search (Part 1)
With Twitter you can simply "search" for something you’re looking for (like the way you can with a search engine), the difference is it's instantaneous – there’s no spidering and caching required, and results from tweets posted a moment ago will appear. The second type is an always-open search, for which you can create a dedicated column in your feed. Through this method every time your followed word is mentioned, you’ll be alerted. This is a great way of following your business name and responding to the complaints people go public with!
5. Learn To Search (Part 2)
Just like Google and other engines, the search function on Twitter can be used for more than simply looking for word and phrase mentions. In Advanced Search you can search by date range or geographical region, do negative searches (i.e. ignoring certain words) or filter for links, content types, users and retweets.
6. Be Part Of The Community
Don’t expect people to simply follow you and hang on your every word. Unless your account is solely for making announcements, you need to interact, reply to people, retweet, and favorite regularly. People will potentially unfollow you if you’re just using your account for business purposes. To help your community standing you should download TweetDeck (it's Twitter's official, free software) to manage who is contacting you; it's free and very easy to use.
7. Don’t Follow Just To Get Followers
If you’re popular, you’ll gain followers; it’s as simple as that. It will happen organically as people retweet you and their followers like what they see. Don’t fall into the trap of following thousands of people in the hope a proportion will follow back. If you’re following 3000 people it’s unlikely you’ll be able to keep up with what they’re all saying, so anyone hoping for a Twitter relationship simply won’t bother following back. If you've made this mistake and want to remove the people you are following from your account, use Tweepi as it's free and effective way of cleaning up your account.
8. Promote Yourself Gently
As you get to have a link in your profile and can create links in your tweets, you can drive traffic to where you want it to go. The way to do it is organically, however, by creating interesting articles or media. If you have a thousand followers and a proportion of them retweet it, your message could go viral. We might not be talking Gangnam Style levels of success, but creating a buzz within your sector, or city, could be big news for you.
9. Understand The Medium
Recognise the streaming nature of Twitter means a lot of your tweets will never be seen by a lot of your followers. Tailor your use with this in mind; that is, don’t make major announcements with a single tweet and hope everyone will see it. On the other hand, don’t tweet the same thing over and over as the people who have seen your message might think it’s new, click it and get frustrated when it’s not. For this reason, a normal blog or direct email is the best way to make one-off announcements – but by all means post one or two tweets too, just make sure you use the # for your targetted audience.
And finally...
10. Let Employees Use The Account
Letting your co-workers use the Twitter account can make sure all your mentions are picked up on and your stream is updated frequently. This can only be done once the individuals have your trust and when you’ve issued a firm set of guidelines, of course! Good standards of English, spelling, and grammar need to be adhered to when you tweet regularly. It's important for regular updates as an account that’s barely used due to time constraints will start to look abandoned fairly quickly, so it’s always worth introducing ways of injecting a regular stream of content that’s on-message.
