How To Use Twitter

April 29th, 2011 | copywriting tips, social media, social media marketing, twitter

If you’re a business owner breaking into the world of Twitter you’ve probably set up your account, uploaded your avatar (using your photo), written your short bio and are now sitting in front of the screen scratching your head.

How do you go about using it as a business/social media platform?

Unless you want to land yourself the leading role in Spamalot don’t constantly bang on about business all the time.

Admittedly some of your offers will be useful to your followers but if you constantly tell people when you’re doing, how amazing your business is and what you’re selling they are going to get seriously cheesed off. The result will either be a lot of people hitting the unfollow button or a bunch of people that aren’t going to be interested in engaging with you.

So if you can’t use it for business bombardment what can you use it for?

Well, let’s get one thing straight, you can mention your business and tell people what you’re doing but just not all the time. Intersperse business tweets with personal reflections and comments. Twitter is all about building relationships and as such people need to get to know the real you. The only way that’s going to happen is by your personality shining through.

Have you gone pale at the thought of being ‘you’ online? That’s why I love Twitter so much. As a one-woman-band I think it’s really important that people get to know who I am. So my tweets usually consist of:

Links to my latest blog posts
Links to other things I found interesting
Inane ramblings (there’s a lot of those)
Copywriting/marketing tips
Retweeting other people’s tweets
Pleas for help

That last one highlights one of the major benefits of Twitter (certainly in my eyes). Since I’ve been tweeting I’ve had various IT issues and the such like which I’ve tweeted about only to have several knight’s in shining armour come to my rescue. And when you work alone that type if support is priceless.

Of course it has also proven very beneficial to me in finding new clients too. You can read all about that in Mark Shaw’s fantastic Twitter Your Business book (click on the image to go and take a look at it). At just £10 it’s a great investment to make sure you get the most out of Twitter – and before you ask, no, I’m not on commission!