We love Twitter. It is the fastest growing social media tool but, surprisingly, most people just don’t know how to make full use of it.
Twitter is not a place to talk. It is a place to communicate with others and to listen to what others are saying. To do Twitter well, you need a strategy.
Step one: Set your strategy
- What are you trying to achieve with Twitter?
- What's the “value” you bring to the conversation?
- Who do you want to connect with?
- How do you plan to deepen your contacts by moving people from Twitter and onto your email list or Facebook page?
- What tools will you use to measure success?
Step two: Optimise your profile
- Create a branded Twitter skin and use a high quality profile photo.
- Understand privacy and security settings
- Include key words in your profile and hashtags
- Learn basic “Twitter-speak,” and know the difference between an @mention and a direct message.
- Understand retweeting and why following back is important.
Step three: Listen, search and follow
- Work out who the established thought leaders and experts in your field is and follow them.
- Learn from their conversations, who they talk to, what they talk about and the tone they use.
- Create a Twitter list, a sorting mechanism that allows you to follow the tweets from a selected group of people in one stream.
Step four: Start participating
- Now is the time to have a conversation selectively and only when you can add value.
- If you see something you like, retweet or add a comment to the original tweet.
- Follow people when they follow you – as long as they ‘fit’ your strategy.
- Be polite.
Step five: Build relationships and grow your following
- Use Twitter to tweet content from your website or facebook.
- Use Twitter to increase Facebook page likes.
- Never just push stories though; Twitter is about conversations and adding value.
- Review your strategy regularly and tweak accordingly.