Twitter

Everyone from politicians and journalists to children are "tweeting" but Twitter is also becoming a useful tool that companies are using to grow and promote their businesses. As a small business owner, Twitter could play a vital role in spreading the word about your products / services and allow you to actively engage with your clients.

What Exactly is Twitter and What the Heck are Tweets?

If you are still asking this question, do not feel bad. As popular as it is, not everyone knows much about it and even more wonder what is the point of using it? I even asked myself that question before I realized the value of it. First of all, Twitter is a social media tool that allows you in less than 140 words or less to post basically whatever you want to several or to thousands of people at once. You "follow" people and people follow you (your followers). The tweets are the actual posts that you type into the "What's Happening" field at the top of the Twitter page. When you enter your tweet and then press the "tweet" button, your followers receive your tweet immediately. There are many ways which you can tweet about your business to help expand your online presence.

How Can Twitter Help My Business?

The first step in joining the Twitter community is to go to www.twitter.com and set up a Twitter account. It's free and all you need is an email address. You then create your username which can have a maximum of 15 characters. Once you have an account, click on the "Find People" link at the top of the page to find others to follow. For example, if you own a flower shop, you may want to do a search on flower shops or related industries and see what other Twitter users appear and then click to follow them. You may want to follow competitors, colleagues in your industry and anyone relevant to your line of work. This will help you as a small business owner to stay on top of what is relevant and topical in your industry - as well as be a part of it. This will get you started.

As a small business, you can tweet:

• Company Information - Do you want to offer any type of online support to your clients? If your customers are having any type of questions or issues with a product or service, you can provide tweets to them to address their concerns that can link back to your site. What about information about staff - new hires, promotions, etc?

• Marketing / promotional - Are you planning an event, a webinar or having a speaker? Are you having a sale on a product or service? Are you offering a coupon or a discount? You can provide a link to that promotion that links back to your site, thus drawing more traffic to your site and creating ways of keeping visitors returning regularly.

• General - A great way to establish your business as a "good citizen" of the community is to provide information that is helpful to others. Are you an interior designer? You could tweet decorating tips (remember the 140 characters or less) and have it link back to your site. By the way, if you have a link that is too long for the character restrictions, there is a site called bit.ly, that shortens long URLs and also enables you to track the activity related to the link. (There are many companies like this but this is the one that I learned about first). What if your are a caterer? You could tweet information about cooking tips or recipes that link back to a blog or website.

Becoming a part of the Twitter environment by providing information that helps others also promotes your business. Ultimately, you are trying to link back to your website or your blog - you want to lead people to your place of business, engage them and have them return on a regular basis. You want to be careful of using Twitter only to "sell" or promote a product or services. Studies have shown that constantly pitching to an online community is a turnoff and you may not be taken seriously. Mix it up a bit. Share your knowledge, offer advice, help others and promote your business.

You can also help others in the Twitter community by "re-tweeting." Re-tweeting is when you like a particular post, go to the "What's Happening" field, type RT for re-tweet, hit your space bar, type the "@" and then cut and paste the tweet that you like immediately after the "@" and then click the "tweet" button. This will send it to all of your followers and the original Tweeter will appreciate the endorsement. if you are tweeting interesting tweets, you will probably be re-tweeted at some point also!

Another great element of these social media tools, including Twitter is that you can add your Twitter feed to your blog or website. You can go to www.twitter.com/widgets and customize a widget. Once you create the widget, you are then able to copy and paste the code to your website or blog. This is another way of keeping your website visitors engaged once they visit your site. You can also add a Twitter badge on your site - the "Follow us on Twitter" graphic that you see on many websites that you visit.

By the way, the cute little blue bird images are Twitter badges that I used from the website Twitter Buttons. There are badges for most social networking sites. You can find many websites with these cute little images.

Happy Twittering!