Sites have the option to link social media accounts on their homepage or footer area but you must first have a profile to link to. This article will explain the benefits of having a Twitter profile, how to create a profile to link to from your site, and how to use it to the advantage of your site.
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Benefits of Twitter
Twitter can work to help promote your blog posts and website in a focused way. You can create Twitter Lists (private or public) that could help you organize people by target groups or geographic locations. Twitter is not for everyone but is another opportunity to use keywords and phrases, and provide a relevant external link. It takes time, and consistency to build up communication. Some target audiences are easier to engage than others. With any social media profile it is imperative that you start and then stick with it.
Setting up a Twitter Profile
1. On your internet browser, go to http://twitter.com. You will see this opening page:
2. Fill in the fields in the New to Twitter? sign up section. Enter your Full Name, Email Address, and Password (create a unique password you would like for your account). Then click Sign up for Twitter.
3. Create a User Name - this could be your company name, or if that is taken an easy to recognize variation of your company name.
4. Now that your account is activated, Twitter will then provide tutorial on getting started with your new account:
- Brief introduction of what a “Tweet” is
- How to follow an existing Twitter user to get someone’s tweets (Need to follow at least 5 to get started)
- Browse Categories by selecting topics you are interested in
- Find people you know by searching contacts through your email account(s): Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL
PLEASE NOTE: You can skip any of the above steps by clicking “Skip this step >>” link below on the left side panel. And then you can begin tweeting!
How to use Twitter - Best Practices
It is possible to manage all of your Social Media profiles in just 15 minutes or so a day. In order to get it all done in a timely manner you really need to be active every single work day. Your every day routine might look something like this on Twitter:
- Do a quick search on trending news in your topic of business.
- Find a few stories (could be your blog posts too) that might be of interest to your customers or industry partners.
- Tweet one, and schedule a few others to be automatically sent from your Twitter account later in the day. Applications like the HootSuite can do this for you.
Using Twitter for cross promotion is certainly a great way to get the most out of your other efforts. When you have new content on your site including site pages, events, blog posts, try to update ALL of your channels to get the most out of it. For example; Twitter, Facebook, Delicous, etc. Wherever you have profiles update them. Make it part of your routine.
Something important to point out is, as you grow your Twitter following be sure to establish and define how Twitter and Facebook are different from each other? How/why would you encourage someone to follow you on both Twitter and Facebook? This is important to know since you will be cross promoting. Ask your Twitter followers to ‘like’ you on Facebook and vice versa.
It can be challenging to come up with something interesting to talk about every day. If you take a look at our account http://twitter.com/#!/webshopmanager you will notice that we find interesting articles to retweet and talk about. You don’t have to solely generate the content. You can ‘crowd source’ a bit. Just tweet what your target audience is interested in. Always bring value to the conversation.
On Twitter, only “follow” relevant people. If someone follows you, check out their profile and if they are not a good fit i.e. green cleaning companies, etc, do not feel that you HAVE to follow them back. You certainly do not. There are two main reasons why this is a bad idea:
- Your stream will be flooded with irrelevant tweets that will distract you from communicating with potential clients and strategic alliances.
- When you want someone to follow you, they will look at who you are following to get an idea of your interests. Green Cleaning Companies and every Internet Marketer out there will not give them a clear understanding of who you are as a company.
Also, keep the number of people you are following close to the number of people following you. When this number is skewed in favor of people you are following i.e. following 525 vs. only 25 following you, it comes across as spam.
Summary
Use Twitter as another vehicle to bring value to the conversation with your target audience and sprinkle in mentions of new content on your site and blog posts. Watch the number of shameless plugs, try to limit yourself to one out of seven posts about your company. Then do practice! Make tweeting part of your every day routine and it will get easier.