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140 Characters Or Less
By: Lisa Horn, CAS
Issue: August-September 2009

Ten tips to help build your business community—one tweet at a time.

Twitter has become a worldwide phenomenon—one that has even entered the promotional products industry. It is a forum to highlight products and services, showcase expertise and connect with others who have opted-in to follow you. This is a captive audience that will grow—but only if you give followers a reason to care about what you tweet.

Getting Started
Signing up for Twitter is easy. Just create a free account and you’re ready to type your first 140 characters. While it is simple to get started, you must treat this like any other marketing activity and appropriately represent yourself, your company and your brand. By following these 10 tips, you’ll be tweeting like a pro in no time.

1. Select Your User Name
Sounds easy, but how do you want to be known in the Twittersphere? Your name or company name are logical places to start, but it may already be taken. (The process is similar to establishing a name for your e-mail address.) So you might have to get creative—add a middle initial, separate your first and last name with an underline or use a combination of your name and company. For example, mine is @thepublicitygal.

2. Get The Basics Right
Craft a bio that identifies who you are, what you do and what makes you and your business unique. Include a link to your website or blog to boost your online traffic. And always include a real photo of yourself. You can use your company logo as your avatar image (which is appropriate if you have multiple people tweeting for your company), however this won’t give followers a personal connection to your biz.

3. Don’t Protect Your Tweets
In the settings menu, you can choose to protect your tweets where you must approve all followers. But this is a huge turnoff to tweeple. The point of Twitter is to connect with others you find interesting and who feel the same way about you. If getting through a locked door is a prerequisite to joining the conversation, most will keep surfing.

4. Register Yourself In Directories
To gain followers, you must be findable. Directories such as wefollow.com, twellow.com, twitr.org and geofollow.com are free directories where you can list yourself. Popular categories for our industry include #advertising, #marketing and #promotionalproducts.

5. Start Following People
Part of the Twitter game is the I-follow-you and you-follow-me mentality. But don’t expect everyone that you follow to follow you back, and don’t feel obligated to follow everyone who follows you. By following those who interest you and have something of value to offer—whether it’s sales tips, product ideas, discount coupons or inspirational quotes—you get what you want in your Twitter feed, and nothing else.

To begin, use the Twitter directories. In addition to finding other industry practitioners, look in other categories that interest you. #entrepreneur, #businessowner and #smallbusiness categories are good places to start. If you want to learn more about social media, look for tweeple in #socialmedia, #socialnetworking or #blogger.

Once you select people to follow and you begin to gain followers, check out who they follow and who follows them. This not only broadens your network but also connects you to new people.

And if you have an unwanted follower, block him or her. This allows you to keep your tweets public but also have control over who is in your inner circle.

6. Create Compelling Content
Good content is the foundation for any marketing endeavor, and it’s especially true for Twitter. You’ll see all kinds of tweet styles. Some are all business and only tweet about their products and services. Others are all personal and often give TMI. There are those who tweet nothing but famous quotes, links to articles or retweets of the day’s headlines.

You must determine not only your own style but also your strategic reasons for tweeting and then plan content accordingly. Try to avoid pushing product. A better strategy is having a mix—tips to help followers do something better, exclusive offers and interesting article links sprinkled with something personal. The more you know about something or someone, the more you care.

7. Tweet Consistently
Consistent communication with followers is essential to gaining ground on Twitter. Consistent, however, doesn’t mean constant. Too many tweets can be just as detrimental, if not more so, than too few tweets. Machine gun or rapid-fire tweets (more than three tweets within a minute or two) are annoying.

Followers are online throughout the day. Develop a schedule and send tweets based on when your most important followers (i.e., #best customers) tend to be online. There are interfaces (HootSuite, TweetDeck, Tweetie, twitterfeed, to name a few) that allow you to write tweets and schedule them for delivery later.

In addition to being consistent in terms of daily or weekly communication, also be consistent with how you position your brand and image. Don’t tweet anything that contradicts what you’d say to a client or prospect face-to-face.

And if something you’re thinking about tweeting would offend your grandma, don’t click update. Chances are, you could offend a client or prospect. Even worse, you could end up with a lawsuit on your hands. (Just ask Chicago resident Amanda Bonnen, whom Horizon Realty is suing for $50,000 in defamation.)

8. Go For The Retweet
Retweeting, noted as RT, is the practice of quoting/repeating/passing along another’s tweet. When you read a tweet that really impresses, motivates or even surprises you, pass it along. But make sure you include the source’s user name and indicate RT.

When writing your own tweets, keep in mind yours may be retweeted. If you use the entire 140 character limit in your tweet, followers won’t have room to include your user name and the RT identifier. Keeping your tweets in the 115-120 character range gives opportunity for the big RT.

9. Promote Yourself
Once you start tweeting, let others know. Include a link to your Twitter profile in your e-mail signature and on your website, blog, LinkedIn page, Facebook profile, UPIC directory listing and any other place where you market your business. Invite your clients to follow you and, in turn, follow them.

10. Stay Up-To-Date
Twitter continues to evolve every day, and there are websites dedicated to the intricacies of tweeting. TwiTip (twitip.com) is edited by Darren Rowse (@ProBlogger) from ProBlogger Blog Tips and is all about Twitter. Mashable is a social media guide blog that has a comprehensive section on Twitter. These are good places to start, and a quick Google search will uncover even more ways to improve your tweeting skills.

Building Your Business Community
Twitter is a great addition to your marketing arsenal. And if done correctly, it can expand your reach with clients and prospects, boost your brand image and even land new clients (it has for me). Like any other type of social networking, you get out of it what you put into it.

When you tweet, think about what your followers need to know to help them do business better, be more successful or keep going despite having a tough day—or week. When you take the focus off what you want to say and turn it on to what your audience needs to hear, you’ll find success.

Lisa Horn, CAS, former editor of PPB, is an independent corporate copywriter and media relations specialist who helps businesses build their brands, position themselves in the marketplace and get the publicity they desire. Based in Irving, Texas, she is a frequent contributor to Promotional Consultant and other niche publications in the entrepreneurship and sales markets. Follow her on Twitter at @thepublicitygal.


The Verbal RT
What’s better than getting retweeted? Actually having a client verbally quote one of your tweets back to you.

Recently, I was working with a client to completely rework his website content. During the discussion, he mentioned that he had read somewhere about changing the way you communicate with clients and prospects. Instead of thinking about all the things you want to say regarding your products and services, you should see the site from your audience’s perspective and think about what they need to know.

“Hmmm,” I said, “This sounds like one of my tweets.” I checked my list of posts and found this one on June 24: “When developing content, stop thinking about what u want 2 say & start thinking about what ur audience needs 2 know.”

We both laughed as I read this back to him. But the point is clear: Followers remember what you tweet. And if it’s good advice, they’ll take it.—LH

Daily Diversions
Want to know how many tweets are sent per minute? TweeSpeed can tell you: tweespeed.com.

Want to know how your Twitter account (or those of your competitors) rates? Check out Twitter Grader: twitter.grader.com.

Want analytics on your average tweets per day, tweet density, aggregate hourly and daily tweets, RT data and interfaces used? TweetStats makes your graphs: tweetstats.com.—LH