I have to admit, this is a new territory for me. I’m very new to Twitter – so I’m learning this stuff as I write this post. Up to this point, I when I heard someone rave about Tweeter or Facebook – I just scratched my head. After all what can be so great about reading what someone had for breakfast or when someone is taking a shower….
I mean, I can see how it’s a good way to stay in touch with people and friends. Building connections with people and getting to know them on a personal level. However, so far I much preferred speding my time doing keyword research and writing another keyword-optimized article to be posted on Ezinearticles.com or Hubpages, than expose even the most innocent detail of my private life to the world… (you can tell I’m not much of a social person, either).
Well, one of my New Year’s resolutions have been to become more active in the social media and finally learn what the fuss is about.
So What’s So Great about Twitter?
If you are like me – still pretty much clueless about how to take advantage of this medium - I found a great article about 10 ways how twitter can change someone’s life. If you still need convincing, here are some benefits you may want to consider:
1) Immediate access to people and information
I used to go to Google when I had a question or needed to research or understand something better. Now, I tweet. And all the questions I ask on Twitter get personalized, specific answers from friends and strangers who are willing to share their knowledge and expertise with me. I’m learning so much faster now!2) The ability to market myself 24/7 without leaving my house or spending a dime
(…) Thanks to Twitter, I can network and market myself all the time, even when I’m not at my computer (and instead playing with my kids), and I get to be relaxed and comfortable in my own house and on my own time. (…)6) Being surrounded and inundated with messages from my target market and what they want from me, making it easy for me to create solutions for them quickly
(…) I do searches on keywords and browse tweets and the people who are tweeting them to see what my target market is talking about. I watch/listen for problems, struggles, and pain points, and then start developing my solutions. When I have a new idea, I simply ask my followers on Twitter what they think of it. Good response? I create the offering. Low/bad response? I ditch it and move on.7) Being approached by other thought leaders who invite me to speak, collaborate, teach, write or coach, rather than me hunting for these outlets of exposure
Really, who has time to hunt for opportunities? Thanks to Twitter and my marketing strategy that is built around it, I am no longer a hunter and am now a receiver of opportunities to do cool things with other cool people. My presence on Twitter helps other people find me, and we’re able to connect and build things together that I would never be able to do by myself.
The most powerful tool I know of to build visibility, credibility and my brand
Well, enough said. Almost. Because I like to talk and write J. I have around 8,500 followers. That means that everything I tweet reaches all of these people. And then there’s the whole viral thing, which means that all the people following those people see my tweets, too. And so on. My Twitter profile is my virtual business card. How else could I get my business card into the hands of 8,500+ people (and I only have to type 140 characters to do it)9) Creating a single platform in which I can leverage everything else I do in my business
I can tweet about my blogposts, my podcasts, my videos, my mastermind groups, my membership programs, my articles, my info products and my BlogTalkRadio shows with just a few clicks of the mouse. Twitter is the center of my online presence, making it easy for people who are interested in finding out more about what I do to have easy access to all I offer.From 10 Ways Twitter Changed My Life by Lara Galloway.
So How Do You Sign Up For Twitter?
- To sign up, go to http://www.twitter.com and click on “Sign up now”.
- Choose your username, which can either be your name or your business name, or a keyword of what your business sells. Your username will them become a part of your twitter url. For example my Twitter url is http://www.twitter.com/JoannaSlodownik. Fortunately, you are allowed to change your user name if you change your mind.
- Once you have chosen a unique username, click on Create my account.
- You will now need to fill in the rest of your information.
- If you have a website, enter your website url. For this you can either link to your main page on your website or a specific page on your website for your Twitter followers.
- Write a short bio. Twitter directories will use your bio to add you to different categories within their listings so make sure what you have in this section is how you want to be known.
- Upload your photo, logo, etc. It’s a good idea if you are going to jump into social media sites that allow you to build profiles to create a square image, or avatar as they are called, to use on your profile and often with your activity. Keep the overall size of this image small but understand that some tools expand the image so you might want to upload a 400 x 400 px image.
Once you have filled in your basic information entered, you are ready to start tweeting!
You will be given a home page and a profile page – ie: my profile is http://twitter.com/JoannaSlodownik. So my twitter handle is @JoannaSlodownik.
Start following a few people right away to get used to Twitter and then follow more and more people the more comfortable you get. Following someone simply means receiving their Twitter updates. When you follow someone, every time they post a new message, it will appear on your Twitter home page. New messages are added to your home page as people post them, so you always get the updates in real time. When you log in, you can see what the latest updates are.You can search for people by name or user name, import friends from other networks, or invite friends via email. Once you’ve found your friends, follow them to start getting their updates.
Note: Unless you are following others your twitter feed will be empty. If you don’t have followers then nobody will see your tweets.
There are no limits as to how often or how many Tweets you make a day.
So, now the question remains – what do I write about?…
Incorporating Tweets on your blog
Twitter can easily be integrated with other communication tools, like Facebook, or your WordPress blog. We have a link here to a plugin that will make a widget available for your blog sidebar to display your tweets. The plugin properly handles twitter feeds, including @username and links parsing. It supports displaying profile images, and even lets you control whether to display the time and date of a tweet or how log ago it happened (about 5 hours ago, etc).
Twitter Widget Pro allows you to not only have more than one instance of this widget on your site, but even allows more than one instance of this widget in a single sidebar. How cool is that!
Twitter Resources
You can go to the twitter help guide
http://help.twitter.com/portal where you can get all your basic how to questions answered.
I also found two good tutorials about Twitter.
Mastering Twitter in 10 minutes or less by Chris Demetrios.
Using Twitter For Business by Duct Tape Marketing.
This is a brief overview of Twitter for complete beginners (4 minutes)
How To Use Twitter Effectively for Business and Advocacy (57 Minutes) (haven’t watched the whole thing yet, but it may have some good info).
