Intro to Twitter

According to Nielsen Online, social networks and blogs are now the 4th most popular kinds of online activities. 67% of the world online population are now visiting them and the time they’re spending on them is growing by three times the overall growth rate of the internet.

Some social networks have grown to such enormous proportions that they rival entire countries in terms of population—if Facebook, for example, was a country, it would be the fifth-most-populated in the world (right between Indonesia and Brazil). [Smashing Magazine]

What's all the fuss about Twitter

According to the Twitter FAQ, “Twitter is for staying in touch and keeping up with friends, no matter where you are or what you’re doing.”

“Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send updates via SMS, instant messaging, email, to the Twitter website, or any one of the multitude of Twitter applications now available”. [Wikipedia]

On the surface

Twitter allows you to post commentary on:

Talking about your daily lives
Pointing to stories you find around the web
Promote their wares or even themselves

Diving deeper ...

You can monitor what's happening around the world as it happens.

A recent example of how handy twitter is, came about when we experienced a fuel shortage in Georgia. As twitter users in Atlanta found gas stations with gas to sell, they posted the location to twitter so other users could find them too. If we were driving to get a gas, we could query through twitter to see if it still had gas and if not, where the nearest alternative station to our current location.

This can give you real time virtual coverage of the world you live in.

Searching twitter can often give you faster updates than a search engine which relies on web pages to publish a story in order for the search engine to catalog it.

It's all about communication and more importantly. Twitter is a social network.

Twitter updates have a limit of 140 characters. This is to allow them to be easily sent over mobile SMS systems. Twitter has since been coined a ‘micro blogging’ platform due to this reliance on short updates. The updates have to be plain text. You cannot embed HTML or any kind of control codes. The only exception to this rule is links.

Why you should use Twitter

It keeps you connected with:

Your community
Your Industry
Your friends
Your World
Your customers and colleagues

What can you use twitter for?

Share updates on your life
Start conversations
Find advice and answers
Promote yourself

How can a business leverage twitter?

Increased exposure
Offer proactive customer service & support
Answer questions
Promote events, products and services
Connect with our customers
Poll information by location

How should a business approach twitter?

Be conversational
Jump in the discussion
Pay Attention
Pace yourselves

What should be avoided?

Do not be too sales orientated
Be repetitive and dull
Follow everyone who follows you

Some Basic Concepts

Tweet - When you post or write your 140 characters on twitter and hit send it’s called a tweet or tweeting
Handle – that’s your twitter name @ducttape – balance short with descriptive and no matter what your business handle is get your personal name if you can even if you don’t plan to use it right now. – it’s like your URL and will have value some day.
Follow – this is simply the act of adding someone to your list of people you are following – this makes their tweets show up on your homepage.
Replies – this is what it is called when someone writes a reply to a tweet @BohemianPixel Interesting article on GeoMedia
Retweet – this is a way of republishing someone else’s tweet – the original tweet along with author stays in tact, but you are basically showing someone’s tweet to your followers – many people find this a great way to add content and acknowledge good stuff from the folks they follow
DM – this is a message that is sent directly to another user. They must be following you for you to DM them, but this is a very useful tool for private messages and generally a good choice when you start going back and forth with someone on something your entire base of followers might not find interesting.
Hashtag – this is a way people categorize tweets so that others might use the same tag and effectively create a way for people to view related tweets – it will be something like #BohemianPixel – more on this later.

How to get started

Go to the signup page and create an account. Then go an read the twitter help guide this is where you get all your basic how to questions answered.

Once you create an account you will be given a home page and a profile page – ie: my page is

http://twitter.com/BohemianPixel

So our twitter handle is @BohemianPixel. From these pages you can find others Twitter streams to follow, post your own messages or even follow tweets aroudn the world as they come in.

It’s a good idea if you are going to jump into social media sites that allow you to build profiles to create a square image, or avatar as they are called, to use on your profile and often with your activity. You need to keep the overall size of this image fairly small but know that some tools expand the image so you might want to upload a 400 x 400 px image

I have an account, now what?

Start using Twitter Search to listen for your name, competitor’s names, words that relate to your industry or interests. (Listening always comes first.)
Add a picture. Twitter is a personal communication tool, use a picture rather than a generic image, it helps validate who you are.
Talk to people about THEIR interests, too. I know this doesn’t sell more products, but it shows us you’re human.
Point out interesting things in your industry, not just about you.
Share links to other items of interest in your community. ( @wholefoods does this well).
Don’t get stuck in the apology loop. Be helpful instead. ( @jetblue gives travel tips.)
Be wary of always agressively marketing our products and services. Our customers will love it. Others will tune out.
Promote BohemianPixels’ out-of-work stories. ( @TheHomeDepot does it well.)
Talk about non-business,.

Who do I follow?

In twitter terms, following someone simply means that their posts, or tweets as they are called, show up on your homepage (or text messages via mobile phone option) To make twitter more useful for many of the objectives above you need to follow others and begin to have others follow you. Some people take very aggressive and, often, time consuming leaps into to this and try to follow and be followed by everyone on twitter. Again, back to the objectives, most often quality over quantity is best.

What do I say?

Another tough question. Whatever your answer, it needs to be 140 characters or less. If, for instance you want some immediate feedback on things, you may choose to pose some questions. This often stimulates conversation but it can also do a great deal in terms of helping your make a decision.

Instead of answering the question, “What are you doing?”, answer the question, “What has your attention?”
When promoting a blog post, ask a question or explain what’s coming next, instead of just dumping a link.
Ask questions. Twitter is GREAT for getting opinions.
Follow interesting people. If you find someone who tweets interesting things, see who he/she follows, and follow them.
Tweet about other people’s stuff. Again, doesn’t directly impact your business, but makes us feel like you’re not “that guy.”
When you DO talk about your stuff, make it useful. Give advice, blog posts, pictures, etc.
Share the human side of your company. If you’re bothering to tweet, it means you believe social media has value for human connections. Point to pictures and other human things.
Don’t toot your own horn too much.

Swamped with Information

The more people you subscribe to, the more information you have to wade through. There are some guidelines to keep your sanity.

You don’t have to read every tweet.
You don’t have to reply to every @ tweet directed to you (try to reply to some, but don’t feel guilty).
Use direct messages for 1-to-1 conversations if you feel there’s no value to Twitter at large to hear the conversation
Use services like Twitter Search to make sure you see if someone’s talking about you. Try to participate where it makes sense.
3rd party clients like Tweetdeck and Twhirl make it a lot easier to manage Twitter.
If you tweet all day while your coworkers are busy, you’re going to hear about it.
If you’re representing clients and billing hours, and tweeting all the time, you might hear about it.
Learn quickly to use the URL shortening tools like TinyURL and all the variants. It helps tidy up your tweets.
If someone says you’re using twitter wrong, forget it. It’s an opt out society. They can unfollow if they don’t like how you use it.
Commenting on others’ tweets, and retweeting what others have posted is a great way to build community.

Twitter Search

This search tool allows you to monitor anything you can search. It can be used to see what's being said to me @BohemianPixel and then do searches like “Conference” or “GeoMedia” – This is a great way to stay in touch and even network with folks who have an interest in our products and services.

Some large organizations such as Dell, use twitter very effectively to communicate with customers - happy and sad alike. This has become a major customer communication tool for them because they can respond immediately. Dell also claims that sales attributable to Twitter exceeded $3 million this year.

Lastly, twitter search allows you to create RSS feeds from your searches so you can have them sent directly to your RSS reader or you can republish a stream of content on your website

#Hashtags

There is a pretty useful trick that twitter insiders use all the time called a hashtag. The roots of the #tag are buried somewhere in IM coding, but it’s what you can do with it using twitter that matters. The hashtag or #tag added to a tweet acts as way to create categories, groups or topics for tweets that others can use as well. This way, tweets can easily be grouped together using the search.twitter.com feature.

Let me give you a very commonly used tactic for this. Let’s say a group of folks are attending a workshop and tweeting their notes in real time. If everyone at that workshop were asked to add something like #torchwood to their tweets, everyone present or not can see and share all the notes in one place. During earthquakes and fires hashtags are a great way for people to get news. Promoting events and product launches via a hashtag helps keep the word in context

Companies often use hashtags as a way for remote employees to use twitter as a communication tool for all the stuff people should stay on top of. You can use #tags for live webinars and then people tweet and ask questions via twitter you can use a back channel of conversation and notes and another source of relevant content to support the webinar.

You can also find hot trends via hashtag at search.twitter.com. The homepage lists the trending tags. More than one twitter user has found that jumping into a hot trend conversation is a great way to connect with folks on something of shared interest.

Anyone can create a hashtag by putting # in front of anything. Keep is short so you don’t use up your 140 and try for a little unique. If you use a tag that others are using you will mingle your results with others.