Reading Time: 3 minutesLast updated on April 13th, 2015 at 02:22 pm
Twitter can be a great thing for small businesses as long as you follow the “rules”.
I was at a seminar recently where one of the small businesses there asked if people ever got business from using it, the tutor said he was sure that some did and I know that there are businesses out there that have made sales as a direct result of using Twitter. Apart from the direct sales you also need to factor in the increase in brand awareness and the chance it gives you to use it for customer service.
So, how can you get started? It’s simple, just follow the tips below and you will be “tweeting” like a pro in no time.
- Go to twitter.com fill in your name, email address and password and then click on the “sign up” button
- Choose your username, it can be up to 15 characters long and I would suggest using your business name if possible or a name that lets you know what your business is about (ours is forestsoftware, and we know of “TheKraftyKitten“, “TheWelshMag” and even names like “Smarter_Mrkting”)
- Once you have verified your email address go to the twitter.com home page and log in (it’s on the top black bar)
- Fill in your profile by adding your logo (or your own photo), fill in your location, web address of your website and a short biography (it has to be less than 160 characters). If you want to then click on the design tab and select a theme for your twitter page.
- Start to find people to follow – you can do this by entering a search in the search box at the top of the page (try searching for your location or your type of business for example to start with). Read the tweets and click on the name to see if the tweeter sounds interesting to you if so follow them. You can do this by clicking on the follow button on their profile page.
- Look to see who the person you have just followed also follows and see if any of them are of interest to you.
- Tweet your first tweet – it can be a message to the person/business you have just followed (so the tweet would be something like “@forestsoftware I’ve just followed you as your tweets are interesting”.
See, I told you it was easy 🙂
A few extra tips for when you start to tweet :
- Remember that tweets can only be 140 characters long – if you are including a link to a webpage try not to put it at the end of the tweet, if someone retweets it the link might get cut off.
- As tweets can only be 140 characters try to leave space for someone to be able to retweet it to there followers (a retweet has @RT and your twitter name on the front so you might want to limit yourself to 120 characters)
- What ever you do, don’t spam! There are people on twitter that will send out messages about their services every hour or so (or even more often). If you do that people will stop following you.
- By the same token, not many people will want to know that you are having a cup of coffee or are waiting for a train. (I also find people that tweet insparational quotes every hour a turn-off as well).
- Be polite – if some follows you at least send them a message saying thank you “D forestsoftware thanks for the follow” if you were to direct (private) message me or “@ forestsoftware thanks for the follow” sends the message out so that anyone can read it.
- Despite what you may read, the number of followers is not a measure of success. I would rather have 400 followers that are related to me in some way than 400,000 followers who would never use my services – and if you are using twitter for business you may feel the same.
If you have any questions about using twitter for your small business feel free to leave a comment below or you could send me a tweet at @forestsoftware, of course you could even follow me 🙂