Twitter Basics

Twitter is growing fast in social media popularity. I use it mostly for PR and business I try not to get caught up in the social aspect of it. What works best for me about twitter is the real-time aspect. I tweet and it is replied straight away. I find what I’m looking for quicker than google search or yellow pages.

How to set up and use Twitter:

1. Go to www.twitter.com and click on the ‘join‘ button on the right hand side
2. You will then come to a page where you type in name, password etc. and a few other key bits of information. You will be asked for a user-name. It is probably best to use something related to your business. Your direct URL will then be shown as http://twitter.com/yourbusinessnamefor the future. (mine is @charliemoos)
3. Once logged in you will see a status box where you can write your 140 page update. You will also see a tab in the right hand corner that is ‘profile’ here you can add a picture or logo and update what you do. There is also a tab to ‘find people’ and various ways to do so.

Tip: Using a free platform like Tweetdeck or Hootsuite will make following Twitter easier to use and more manageable.

Twitter Lingo

• Tweet – the message you write using your 140 characters—it’s what twitter is all about!
• RT – Re-tweet – copy and re tweet another person’s update
• @USERNAME – Simply start a message with @username of the person you want to connect to in your update.
• DM – Direct Message is a private message channel through Twitter.
• Hashtag #– People create ‘hashtags’ to show what a tweet is about, then when somebody searches for that hashtag, they will find all the related messages.

Tips

• Follow people suitable for your business don’t follow everyone you’ll waste your time on irrelevant information.
• Don’t tweet to much about your business interact with other peoples tweets otherwise you will look spammy and people won’t be interested
• Link to your website by adding links into your tweets or add your twitter feed or twitter logo

** time saving tip ** Link your fanpage or blog so that it posts tweets for you

Tweetdeck

• Tweetdeck allows you to organise your followers, mentions (@), DM’s and any #hashtags in neat columns
• Every so often tweetdeck will remind you its still there and let you know if you have any @, DM or #hashtags
• If need be Tweetdeck will enable you to run more than one twitter account side by side
• To reply to people hoover over the avatar (image) and four boxes appear @, RT, DM and block

Tips for Twitter PR

• Ensure you limit your usage everyday. Make a clear distinction between ‘working’ on Twitter and ‘socialising’.
• Make sure your following local magazines, radio stations and newspapers they will all be on Twitter looking for local scoops.
• Also find out if National Magazines are online many baby related ones use twitter to find items for stories they have coming up.
• Search hashtags on twitter #journorequest (I’ve had some success with this) and if you do contact a journalist this way make sure you save their email into your database.

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