140 Characters or Less
How to be the Big Bird of “Tweeting”

By Megan Yamamoto

You may have asked yourself recently – What is Twitter and why is everyone talking about it? Well, Twitter is 2009’s new “It” social networking tool. In fact, the word “Twitter” was one of the top five most Google searched words in 2009 (Google Zeitgeist Report 2009). It is an interactive environment which offers a forum for communicating with people and companies that you know, want to know, or dream about knowing. Twitter is a great tool to spark a dialogue on important topics and updates about your business and products that you are producing.

1. Feed the Bird
So you have decided to start “tweeting”, great! Now you have to keep it up. Finding content to post is sometimes challenging, but that is the beauty of having a limited character count. The more you “tweet” the more impact you have on your community of followers. The most current “tweets” of those who you follow appear at the top of your home page.

2. Be Personal
The reason why Twitter has become such a phenomenon is because it offers the unique opportunity to feel personally connected with your friends, business partners, and celebrities. For this very reason, your business’s Twitter account should “communicate like a person”—even if it’s a “collective” person representing your company or brand. By becoming more “human,” your followers will be likely to check in on you if you offer up personal, relevant information. For example, “LFS has our holiday gift exchange today, wonder what we are going to get?” or “We just presented to our client @clientname, and they were so excited about all the awesome creative!”

3. Ask Questions
Twitter is a Web site that is for communicating. Sometimes the best way to start a dialogue is to pose a question to your followers. Even something as simple as, “How was your weekend?” is enough to draw interest from those who read your tweets. Eliciting responses from your followers creates a conversation and can lead to new contacts and partners.

4. Use Your Links
One of the ways to maximize on your 140 character limit is to include links in your updates. This drives your followers to your Web site or whatever other content you are choosing to share. Twitter is a great platform to drive traffic to your Web site, giving users the opportunity to access more information about who you are and what you do. If your links are really long, you can use free services such as www.tinyurl.com or www.shorturl.com , which will condense your URL and allow for more description within your 140 characters.

5. Follow the Right People
Twitter offers a comfortable environment to start up a conversation with someone that you have never met before. Search for your current rolodex contacts, business partners, and clients, as well as businesses and people who you want to be connected with. Strike up a conversation with these people, pose questions, and you will be surprised to find out how people respond. Twitter offers a step-up from the cold call, meaning that you and your potential contact are coexisting in an sharing-focused environment where you are both active, the “twitterverse.” When you are searching for people and businesses to follow, use www.search.twitter.com.

6. Check in on Your Competition
You may be wondering how to find more people to follow, and to increase your list of “followers”. You can use the Search function which will search for key words and company/people names, but sometimes the simplest answer is to scope out your competition. Check-in on who they are following, communicating with, etc. Look through their list of followers and you may find who you or your business has been looking to connect with.

7. # - ?
You may have seen the infamous hashtag, #, recently. This is something that is essential to utilizing Twitter and connecting with other users. When you make mention of “#” plus a word, phrase, or supplied phrasing, you are directly referencing a “Trending Topic.” When you have “tweeted” using the #phrase, it links to all the other people who are referencing the same topic. If you are at an event and they provide you with the #phrase, tweet it and see how many other people are tweeting about it. This may offer you a perfect opportunity to connect with someone that you may have never met otherwise.

Twitter is the newest craze, but it is also a strategic tool that, when used correctly, can help grow your business through connections. Before you decide to start “tweeting” make sure that you are committed to it. If you use it properly, Twitter can prove to be one of your strongest business development and customer relations tools.

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Need help “tweeting?” Contact LeapFrog Solutions www.leapfrogit.com
Follow LFS on Twitter https://twitter.com/LeapFrogSol

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