In part 2 of our twitter guide new guest blogger, internet expert, David Oliver of Nettle Web Design Ltd. will show you how to get started on the incredibly popular social networking website, Twitter! Now Twitter is a must for marketing savvy businesses to get involved with.

Keeping Tweets Appropriate

• Show that you have interests outside of work, but keep non-business tweets appropriate and not too personal!
• Don’t give away all your secrets – your competitors may read what you post on Twitter, even if they aren’t directly following you.
• Only post tweets that you would be happy for any client, competitor or friend to read. If you want to use Twitter for personal use in addition to business, consider setting up two accounts – one for each – and keep them separate.

 

Trending Topics

Current popular topics – called trending topics – are shown on the right of your Twitter page. Hashtags show topics being trended deliberately to enable easy following of tweets (eg #iranelection, #fathersday); add your own tweets on that topic by including the hashtag in your tweet.

There are certain regular trends you can utilise, with #FollowFriday being the most common – every Friday people tweet lists of other people they recommend following, eg

#FollowFriday networking in Essex @olivda @suesharples @heathernewmarch

Sending Tweets When You’re Away From the Office

There are plenty of websites that will let you schedule tweets – i.e. set up tweets in advance that will be sent at a pre-designated time. Try www.hootsuite.com Hootsuite also has it’s own tool for shortening URLs, and tools for tracking stats such as how many people clicked on a URL you tweeted

If you’re out-and-about, you can send tweets from your mobile phone or PDA. Visit the Twitter help pages for more information about this.

Tracking Your Followers

If you have large numbers of followers, use a site like www.tweetdeck.com/beta to organise your network into groups of people – so that you can easily see what related groups or favourite people are tweeting.

If a tweet is particularly useful, click on the star next to it. It will then be added to your “Favourites” list for future reference.

References

Twitter: @olivda

Email:   david@nettlewebdesign.co.uk

Nettle Web Design Ltd , 01206 266765, www.nettlewebdesign.co.uk