Twitter For Business

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Twitter is a social networking site that has become a very important business tool for keeping in touch with your business contacts and people interested in your area of business. You can use in in a business to business way as an extension of your person to person networking, and you can also use it for business to customer contact to personalise your brand. Twitter can be used as an integral part of your personal and business branding, and is another way of using social media to bring people to your web site.You can also Tweet from your mobile phone to be completely up to date. It is important to know how to make the best of Twitter before using it for business though.

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How To Use Twitter For Business

Twitter Power by Joel Comm

This book explains how to dominate your market one Tweet at a time and is written by one of the most successful online marketing experts who uses Twitter to promote his own business, and he shares his secrets with you. Book from Amazon UK.

Twitter can be an important social networking tool for your business if you use it correctly and don't have unrealistic expectations about what it can achieve. Remember that Twitter is just one aspect of Social networking and should be considered in conjunction with FaceBook, blogs, videos, articles and newsletters.

Tweet regularly and be interesting. Show that you are a real person, with a real life, and let your enthusiasm shine through and your desire to relate to and help people. And only then mention what you have to sell. Be consistent in what you talk about.

Before you start look at Best Practices for Using Twitter for Business .

Promote Your Business With A Background Image

Twitter gives you very little chance to promote your business and so you really need to make the most of using a background image on your page. This can be uploaded easily under Settings > Design > Change Background Image. Use the browse button to find the graphic on your computer and then save the changes.

Your background image is your only branding opportunity so make the most of it. Background images are not clickable, so you can't have hyperlinks. However, you can use text, photographs and logos to promote your brand and personalise your page and make it more interesting. Background images should be large enough to cover the screen of the largest monitors and so 2048 x 1707 pixels should cover this. A left hand columns 240 pixels wide can contain your photograph and details, and this will be visible at all but the lower screen resolutions. You can view any background image by right clicking and choosing 'View background Image' and from there you can save it. This will show you have background images are constructed, and you can base your own background on them, but you should never copy any of these images as all images are are covered by copyright. You can change the colours of other design elements on the page under Settings > Design > Change Design Colours, but be careful that any changes add up to a harmonious image in keeping with your brand.

Reputation And Personal Branding

Twitter can help you build and reinforce your reputation and personal branding by having all your Tweets 'on message'. Now, don't get this confused with all your messages being about trying to sell your product or service, because that's the quickest way to stop people following you. It is best to be yourself and let your personality come through in your Tweets. Mix in messages about your real life and interests, messages about your area of interest and expertise, and add a sprinkling of messages about how your product or service can help others and solve problems, and how they can buy from you. Twitter is not about the hard sell, that just doesn't work.Twitter is much more about reaching out, replying to other people's Tweets, being helpful, authentic and above all being yourself.

Quality Versus Quantity

Don't get caught in the numbers trap! Twitter isn't an ego trip to collect the most followers. Be selective about how you promote yourself to encourage people to follow you. What you want is to have people follow you who will read what you have to say, have an interest in it, care about it, and eventually take action on some of your comments to create a sale. Collecting followers just for the sake of numbers is a complete waste of time and effort, because they won't care about you, won't actually read your Tweets and will never buy from you.

Should You Follow People Who Follow You?

You don't have to follow people back if you don't want to. People will follow you for a variety of reasons. The reason you want is that they are interested in what you are saying and doing, and will eventually buy from you. Unfortunately other people may just be playing the numbers game, and are only following you in the hope that you will follow them. Remember that if you follow them in return you will receive all their Tweets on your home page, and this can then become a problem following the people you really want to follow yourself. However if you intend to become really popular and follow everyone who follows you, there are ways of organising all your incoming Tweets using a service like TweetDeck , Thwirl or Tweetie (Mac).Some people don't follow back e.g. Molly Holzchlag .

Some people follow everyone back out of courtesy. This is the strategy of the people who want to have the biggest number of followers, and collect hundreds of followers a day. There are automated systems for doing this.People who follow back include Joel Comm.

The people you follow and the people following you may be different for a good reason. In my personal Twitter account at http://twitter.com/ColinWinstanley I follow many people that I find interesting and informative. These people often have huge followings, and I don't think for a moment that they would be reading my Tweets, and so I really don't expect them to follow me back. This is different with the people I know locally and meet at networking groups, where I would like the follow to work both ways. In terms of people who follow me from SuperLiving, I currently don't follow back, as I prefer to use SuperLiving's Facebook account or direct e-mails to have any two way conversations.

Twitter For Mobile Phones

There are many Twitter applications to use on your mobile phone, such as Longpost , Twitterberry (For Blackberries) and Tweetie (iPhone).

Follow SuperLiving on Twitter

People Worth Following

You will find lots of people worth following. Start by finding people you know, and then look who is following them.Make sure you follow us at SuperLiving and we will keep you up to date with your lifelong journey to health, happiness and success.

Here are some people who Tweet about how to use Twitter and social media: