Maintaining an effective twitter presence can be a powerful part of your business’ social media marketing strategy. used successfully, twitter can help you:
Develop and promote your brand
Interact and support your customers
Monitor what people are saying about your company and brand
Create buzz around upcoming promotions and events
Develop direct relationships
…and much more.
Twitter is a useful tool that allows you to communicate and interact with other users. It is referred to as “micro-blogging”, meaning you can post short comments, messages or updates limited to a maximum of 140 characters. Originally, this limitation was implemented to make twitter compatible with mobile phones and text messaging.
If you are new to Twitter it’s useful to familiarise yourself with some of the common twitter terminology:
@TwitterUsername
Your Twitter User Name starts with the @ symbol
Follow
Following someone on twitter is the action users take to subscribe to someone‘s updates on Twitter. You do this by clicking the “Follow” button on that specific person‘s twitter page. When you follow someone, their comments will be displayed on your twitter homepage so you know what they are saying.
Follow Back
To follow back is to subscribe to the comments of someone who has recently started following you. In twitter‘s notifications settings, you can indicate whether you‘d like to receive an email alert whenever a new person follows you. In the email, there will be a link to that person‘s profile. By clicking the link, you can check out who they are and decide to follow them back or not. It is not required to follow everyone back, but many people like to.
Follower
A follower is a person who has subscribed to receive your comments. You can view your total number of followers on your Twitter profile page.
Tweet
Your comment, message or update you post on twitter is called a Tweet, consisting of 140 characters or less. It can contain text, photos, links and videos. It’s important to note that whenever you include any of these things they will be counted as a link and automatically take up to 22 characters.
Reply
Click ‘reply’ to respond to a Tweet. Replying to a Tweet is a nice way to build relationships with your followers and join in conversations.
Mention
Bring a Tweet to another person’s attention by including their @username in your message. You could use it to ask someone a question, to thank them or simply to highlight a piece of content.
In a tweet using the @ sign in front of a twitter username is a public message sent from one twitter user to another. By putting @Username anywhere within the body of the tweet they will see it. If you put it at the beginning of the tweet then both you and their followers will see it.
Direct Message (DM)
A DM is a private message sent to another twitter user. You can find this under the Messages option on the Twitter menu bar.
Twitter Stream
A twitter stream is a list of a user‘s real-time tweets. Every time you post a tweet, it goes into your twitter stream, which is found on your Home page.
# Hashtag
A hashtag is a twitter tagging system. Hashtags can easily be created by combining a # with a word, acronym, or phrase (#word) and used as a tag within tweets – remember no spaces though. People use hashtags to organise conversations and make it easier to find all content related to a given topic. Clicking on a hashtag will go directly to the search results for that term.
Retweet (RT)
A Retweet is where you choose to take a Tweet from someone else and Tweet it to your own followers. You can either do this directly with the Retweet button or you can add your own message and include the letters “RT” ahead of the content that you are Retweeting.
Favorite
Favoriting something is a great way of acknowledging or showing your appreciation for a Tweet. It can also be useful to use as a bookmarking tool if you want to easily find a Tweet again.
Trending
Displayed on the left-hand side of your twitter homepage, trending topics or trends are words, phrases, or hashtags that are popular on twitter at a given time. These can be organised by location and are updated in real time.
For Business:
Twitter is a relationship-building and relationship maintenance tool; the most obvious business use of Twitter is to connect with potential customers and leads the same way you would at a networking event.
So – have a go… Set Up a Twitter Account
and see what others are doing!
