So You Want To Get Started On Twitter

If you are serious about building your business, you enjoy interacting with your customers and building relationships; get started on Twitter.

You will start by creating your profile. Creating your profile on Twitter is easy, and much simpler than on Facebook.

One of the most important decisions you’ll make is choosing your account name. If you want to use Twitter for personal use, or brand yourself to promote a service, you can use your own name. When promoting a specific brand or organization, try to stick as close as possible to the name of whatever you are promoting.

After completing your profile, write a short bio in 160 characters or less. Keep it simple and easy to understand.

Finally upload a small image of yourself, or if you want to promote your business you can use your company logo. It will be much easier to connect with people if they can see a picture of a real person, or even a logo of a company. This way they can relate to you, or they can associate you with a product or company.

You should now be ready to start tweeting. I know I have mentioned this already in other posts as well, but don’t “spam” people with advertisements alone. As on any website or blog, you need to post quality content. 

Post something that will be of value to your followers. This doesn’t mean you can never promote your business, but use your discretion to determine a good ratio for your business tweets. A good ratio that is often recommended is +/- one out of every ten tweets.

Once you start tweeting quality content, people will start following you. See what these people are talking about, and if you share interests with them, follow them back.

You can also start finding people on your own to follow. You can use a free tool - such as ManageFlitter – to assist you in this process. By entering names or some keywords that indicates your interest, this tool will search and find people based on your keywords. Choose who you want to follow and ManageFlitter will do the rest  

Try to follow the rule of following people who will follow you back. There is no sense in following people who doesn’t follow you back. It is like talking to a brick wall. It is a one way conversation. ManageFlitter is very helpful in this process as well, filtering and showing you exactly who is not following you, saving you the time to always check who is following you back. Just select the people you want to unfollow and once again, ManageFlitter will do the rest. I find this to be great tool. There are more automated functions available as well if you want to upgrade, but these are optional.

Sticking to the rule of following people who follow you back doesn’t mean you will have to communicate with every single person who follows you on a daily basis. After a while this will be impossible anyway. But during the process you will start to communicate with some people. You will have more communication with some people than with others, but that is how you start building personal relationships.

Even people you don’t necessarily communicate with everyday will still follow you, and you will support each other. They will actually look at what you are tweeting, and when you tweet about your business, or you post a link, they might just click on it to learn more about what you have to offer.

Because you are limited to 140 characters in your tweets, many people are using URL shorteners to turn a long web address into a short one. Popular services are: TinyURL.com, AdF.ly and bitly.

Twitter is a great tool for building a solid foundation for your business when used correctly.