Twitter How To For Business

Let’s start with the basics – What is Twitter and why should you care?

At a basic level Twitter is an information network made up of 140 character messages called tweets however what Twitter really is to those that use it, is a relationship building tool. And how many people really use this you ask? A lot. Twitter currently has over 200M users, 350M tweets per day, and it’s growing really fast with over 460K accounts being added each day.

A common misconception about Twitter is that it’s a tool for celebrities to tell us when they are walking their dog or what they bought at the grocery store. Well, that does go on, but the great thing about Twitter is that you can ignore anything you consider to be “noise” and focus on your customers and prospects. This is a key part of “Twitter how to for business”. You filter what you want to by subscribing and following only those “conversations” that you are interested in and by providing your own quality content.

But you still aren’t clear – Why should you use Twitter?

You want to use Twitter for business because your customers and competitors are using Twitter and a long list of prospects you have never even met are using Twitter. Here are a few basic uses for Twitter:

  • Monitoring what is being said about your business and responding if necessary. It’s very important to be able to respond to any negative comments swiftly
  • Create buzz around a new product launch, an upcoming event, or even a new item on your menu if you are a restaurant
  • Promote original content – talk about things that people will find useful and interesting about your business or industry
  • Position yourself as a subject matter expert so people will listen to you and come to you for advice
  • Increase your network and thus increase your list of potential customers

So now you know why you want to use Twitter, but how about some basic information to get you started? Twitter has a bit of its own language, but don’t worry, you’ll get the hang of it quickly.

Let’s start with some basic terminology:

  • Twitter handle: The name you use on Twitter. Try to use something that can be understood since you are tweeting for business, but not your business name. People want to build relationships with people, not businesses. Your handle will look like this: @gwynnewade (@ followed by your handle).
  • Follow: Subscribing to the updates of others. You are following those people you subscribe to.
  • Followers: People who are subscribed to follow you. They will see everything you tweet in their timeline.
  • Timeline: A list of the current tweets from people you follow. This is found on your Twitter home page.
  • Tweet: An update of no more than 140 characters sent to your followers. Tweets can be viewed by anyone.
  • Direct Message (DM): A private message sent to one of your followers.
  • Hashtag: A word preceded by a hashtag (#) is used to aggregate tweets about a subject. For example, #vailfood2011 could be used to aggregate information about a 2011 food even being held in Vail, CO.
  • Retweet: Forwarding of a tweet that you received to your followers. Of course you only want to forward things to your followers that you think they will find interesting, but this is a form of social recognition for the person you retweet and is important. You are rewarding the originator of the tweet by saying “what you tweeted is important, so I’m going to forward it to my followers”. Retweeting of your content also helps you grow your network because if your content is retweeted, then others will see that you have interesting things to say and they will follow you too.
  • Twitter list: Private of public list of people. One business use of this is to create a list of your competitors and follow the tweets about them to monitor what is going on.
  • Promoted tweet: Paid advertising of a tweet.
  • Twitter search: A very useful search tool that allows you to find users and topics.

Ok, so that’s not too bad, is it? It’s all pretty intuitive once you get the hang of it.

High level steps to getting started:

  1. Go to www.twitter.com and follow the steps to set up a new account and customize it. Trust me, it’s easy and as I said before, over 460K people a day add an account, so it must be easy!
  2. Set up your Bio/Profile, upload a photo, and create a customized background. The Twitter help can assist with all of these if you need help.
  3. Define goals and objectives for using Twitter. These are things like: increasing brand awareness, deepening customer loyalty, and driving traffic to your website. This is a very important step because your goals will drive your tweet content.
  4. Identify the most important social metrics for your business such as click thru rate (to website or blog), network (follower) growth, or follower retention rate.
  5. Set up tools to quantify and monitor progress towards goals. This includes tools like Klout, Peer Index, and TweetReach. Various tools are available based on your social goals.
  6. Set up Tools for productivity and for measuring. There are many productivity tools to help you with Twitter such as Timely.is and Tweetdeck. The great new is that most of these are free tools, so you can try them to see what works for you without any risk.

One of the most important things about using Twitter for business is to provide good quality content and to do it consistently. How often? Well studies indicate that a business should tweet about once an hour to keep people interested. Remember, it’s only 140 characters, so really if you tweet 8 hours a day, that’s only 1,120 characters or about 12 sentences if you want to think of it that way.

That might still sound like a lot, but since there are great tools to allow you to create content ahead of time and schedule it to be delivered, you can easily manage a few days’ content at a time. But remember, that doesn’t mean you just send out content and ignore Twitter – you are there to build relationships, so comment on other’s tweets, respond to your followers, and be engaged!

I know this is a lot of information to digest, but I’ll provide more information on Twitter in my blog including how businesses get the most out of Twitter and where to find content to use on Twitter, so be sure to subscribe via email or RSS for the latest tips. If you need help getting started with how to use Twitter for your business, please contact me and we can set up an appointment to discuss how to get your business started with this very important business tool.


Happy Tweeting!