Twitter for your business
25th August 2009
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Most folk who are internet-savvy have now heard of Twitter, which is a glorified all-comers forum. You may also have heard about its' popularity with celebs and celeb-chasers and how it can also be a handy way of promoting your business online. Go to twitter.com, sign on and at first glance you may wonder what all the fuss is about, because Twitter per se is COMPLETELY USELESS. Start following several users and it soon becomes impossible to keep up with all the entries.

The answer to this problem is Twitter manager software. There is a lot of it out there, but the most popular and easy one to use is TWEETDECK. Completely free, RAM-efficient and easy to download, set up and use, the whole twitter thing becomes a useful tool.

Using tweetdeck you can set up columns that select responses from your favourite/most relevant twitterers, twitters that mention you and if you have Facebook, show entries for that too. In addition if you are online it will alert you in real time as entries appear, making it a handy way to chat.

Now you're up and running, who do you follow? If you are a business, you should target your client base, related businesses and your local area. For example, as a hypnotherapist based in Bradford I follow anyone from West/North Yorkshire, and medical and complementary practitioners, as well as those who share my interest in rock music and West Ham United. The best way to find your targets is through a Twitter search engine. The best one I have found so far is TWEEPSEARCH.COM. I used search words like DAVID CASSIDY, DONNY OSMOND, BAY CITY ROLLERS (oops - only joking!) HUDDERSFIELD GIANTS and HUDDERSFIELD TOWN and soon found the targets I wanted.

Once involved you will have frequent notifications about people who have started following you. It is usual etiquette to follow them in return, but it's worth checking out their twitter page first, to weed out spammers and those who flood their page with nonstop boring/useless "tweets" (as twitter entries are called)

So what do you "tweet"? You want to make it as entertaining/interesting as poss and promote your business at the same time. Other's tweets can also be a good opportunity to respond with helpful/promotional stuff. Remember you have only got 140 characters so keep it punchy. Links to interesting sites (like your own!) is a common tactic. I like to offer words of wisdom and stress management advice. Beware, blatant continuous flogging won't go down well!

Once you feel established there are hundreds of different specialised search engines and twitter applications of various degrees of usefulness, such as TWITDOC which lets you share documents via Twitter and TWELLO, a business directory of Twitter users. I will post an extensive list in my next blog.

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