The best thing about Twitter is that it is amazingly good at driving traffic to your (or other people’s) websites. However, in order to do that effectively, you need to get the basics right.

Getting started:

1. Set up your Twitter account, this is really quick and easy.
2. Make sure that you have your location and website address in your profile as well as a short summary of what you do or who you are.
3. Use a picture or logo, using the default picture implies laziness, ignorance or unprofessionalism.
4. Customise the background. There is a lot of space to put in more information about your business. Photos, phone numbers, e-mail, products – no limit. Just remember that you can’t use the middle of the page. There are a lot of free resources on the internet to help with this so use them to get noticed.
5. Don’t make your account private. What’s the point?

Once your Twitter account is up and running you need to start getting some content and some followers.

Next steps:

1. Set your objectives. Are you selling, informing, educating, being friendly, spreading the word or just mooching?
2. If you have a business, use the search facility to find similar businesses and follow them. They will probably follow you back.
3. If your business is local or regional, use the search facility to find people or businesses near you. Follow them.
4. Read other people’s Tweets and re-tweet the interesting ones.
5. Find interesting stuff relevant to your business and Tweet the links to your followers.
6. See who your competitors/related businesses are following and follow those people.
7. When including links in Tweets use short versions from www.bit.ly or www.ow.ly this will help keep you under the 140 character limit.

Other stuff:

1. Consider using Tweetdeck or Hootsuite to improve your Twitter productivity.
2. Don’t follow everyone who follows you, you may be judged by your followers and if they are all young Russian ladies or get rich quick merchants, your credibility may suffer.
3. Register with other search sites such as Twellow as this will give you an improved local presence.

Finally, be careful who you give access to as hijacking of Twitter accounts is common and although Twitter are very helpful, it is still a pain in the nether regions to get sorted.

You can attend a variety of free workshops covering all aspects of internet marketing run by South Wales Social Media. Visit the website or call 01600 715508.