Brand New to Twitter? Six Steps You Should Take Now To Start Building Your Presence
Posted by kyle, on June 18, 2012
As a local business, you’ve decided it’s time to join Twitter and begin making valuable connections every day 140 characters at a time. So where do you begin?
Set up a complete profile. You have 140 characters with which to sum up the essence of your local business. Use every last one of them. Incorporate hashtags (#) into your profile. There are whole posts written on hashtags, so I won’t go too in-depth here other than to explain that incorporating hashtags into your profile or posts will help people find you when they are searching for the top you place after the hashtag. For example, if your local business is a bakery, you might incorporate #baker into your profile. Take some time to think about what two or three words are most representative of your business and begin using them regularly. They are part of your Twitter brand.
Sign up for software to help ensure your time on Twitter is productive. Surprisingly, after signing up via the Twitter website, you will likely spend very little time logged in there. Why? It is much more efficient and user friendly in many cases to access Twitter via other media. For example, I’d highly recommend that you sign up for HootSuite or TweetDeck so that you can schedule your Tweets. As a local business owner your times is precious and let’s face it, it just isn’t practical to be logged into your computer all day long sending out Tweets.
Ensure you’re sharing good content.The key to attracting and maintaining followers is to consistently provide quality content. The good news is, however, that you don’t need to just share content about your local business; just about anything that you think relates to your business brand and is helpful.
Explore a Twitter chat at least once. A Twitter chat can seem like an oxymoron. How can you “chat” with someone when you can only share 140 characters at a time? A program called TweetChat makes it fairly easy. In order to participate in a chat you join one at a specified time and login in via TweetChat using the chat’s hashtag. The moderator of the chat will pose questions and those who are part of the chat will begin sharing and interacting. There are current over 300 regularly scheduled chats and many could benefit your local business so start exploring.
Don’t wait for people to find you, start following them. As a local business owner, it can get lonely on Twitter if you don’t have many followers. Therefore, don’t wait for followers to come to you. Search for people related to your local business and then follow them. Often, you’ll find the people you follow will follow you back. Before you know it, people will start finding and following you on their own.
Understand and follow the common Twitter norms. As in face to face interactions, good manners are always appreciated. It is social Twitter convention to thank anyone who re-tweets your content or follows you. However, you want to find a way that represents your local business without sounding like a sales pitch or clogging your Twitter feed with thank you tweets.
Ultimately, one of the best ways to learn and become good at Twitter is just to watch and then jump into the conversation!
Chris Marentis is the founder and CEO of Surefire Social and is considered an expert in the field of local business internet marketing. Through Surefire Social, Chris successfully leverages website development, social media marketing, and search engine optimization to generate leads and help local businesses grow using the web.
