Many people have difficulty knowing where to start with twitter and can easily become discouraged because the interface is not intuitive and you can end up shouting in a barrel!
Last February I gave a workshop on twitter which made these suggestions, and you may find them a useful starting point.
- Have a strategy you will implement and MEASURE. If you are using twitter for marketing, for example, a major part of your strategy will involve getting people off twitter onto the phone or your website (or both!)
Here’s the post on having a Twitter Strategy - Find the people you know on twitter and follow/engage with them (upload email addresses is quickest way). You can practice talking to them first and they will be more forgiving (and will introduce you to others). Introductions are essential to good twitter use for individuals.
Here is a screencast on how to find the people you know on Twitter. - Make sure you can see all the channels on the twitter site – your home stream, profile(with your details and tweets), mentions (replies), Direct Messages (in and out) and Favourites. See: Twitter: Why Some People Give Up
- Listen (use ‘find people’ and advanced search on http://search.twitter.com) so you don’t need to read everything (you don’t)
- Set up your profile – inhabit your real estate – including your username, photo, profile text (160 characters) a link (make a ‘twitter landing page’ to link to) and your background image. The background is least important because many people won’t see it (because they use twitter on another platform or mobile phone)
- Share – your content and other people’s as relevant to your target (use URL shorteners)
- Engage using replies, retweets and direct messages, but learn about the etiquette first!
If you’re interested in some of these ideas further then you can see the presentation slides here: To Tweet or Not to Tweet slidedeck
I’m planning to run some screencasts explaining more about each of these ideas shortly.
I really enjoyed this post and wish I had found something this straight forward when I first embraced Twitter in December 2008.
I’ll be passing this along to my network!
Thanks!
Respectfully,
Paul Castain
.-= Paul Castain´s last blog ..The Best Quiz Ever! =-.
Thanks Paul,
As I set up the screencasts I’ll add them into the post as links.
I’m delighted to refer @JustProfs to many of my associated fledgling Twitterers. Su your insight is solid gold and will help new users to ‘GET IT’!
Once again Su you have given a clear and succinct appreciation of the essentials for engaging in ‘pull marketing’ via Twitter.
BTW Did you by any chance use the SlideShow experience as an opportunity to capture a video? I think rather than click through 80+ slides I would have preferred to watch it on video.
Thanks for sterling stuff Su.
.-= LadyBizBiz´s last blog ..Some incredulous statistics on corporate social media participation =-.
Hi Rianne,
Thanks for your compliments. The Twitter presentation was for a paid Emap conference and no video was available, however I’m putting together a series of screencasts using some of the material to investigate how to take these seven steps, hope that will be of interest as a consolation!
Added a link to the screencast: How to Find People You Know on Twitter.