Use your cellphone outside of business hours to send and receive tweets.
Somewhere between an instant message and an email, Twitter offers a unique type of Internet communication. You can send up to 140-character posts, called "tweets," to people who follow you on the service to keep them abreast of what is going on with you and your company. Like any other social marketing service, Twitter has its own dynamics and rules of etiquette. If you can think creatively and stay within acceptable boundaries, Twitter can become a powerful business promotion tool.
Instructions
1. Create a Twitter account. Create a username that is recognizable, either incorporating your company name or a catchy industry term. Fill out your profile completely and upload an avatar, and then start tweeting. Selectively follow other Twitter users, retweet relevant posts and you will soon grow a solid base of followers.
2. Offer information that is of interest to your readers, and vary the information that you tweet. If the only thing you tweet are sales pitches or links to your site, your readers are sure to lose interest quickly. In an interview with "The New York Times," Palo Alto software founder Tim Berry said that the key to promoting successfully on Twitter is to make tweets that are interesting, and do not use overt sales tactics with your followers. Mix up tweets of your own and retweets from other people that your followers might find of interest to keep the information fresh and fun.
3. Engage with your followers. Talk to them instead of at them. Entrepreneur and Internet guru Chris Brogan recommends that you ask engaging questions, such as "What has your attention?" instead of "What are you doing?"
4. Tweet often enough, but not too much. Plan to make at least one tweet per day to your followers, in addition to answering any direct tweets that you receive. If you tweet too frequently, particularly if your information is not relevant and interesting, your followers may stop paying attention. Not tweeting enough is like putting up a sign that you are not engaged with your Twitter followers.
5. Have a clear strategy. Many celebrities, such as Ellen DeGeneres and Ashton Kutcher, use Twitter as a vehicle to interact with their fans, but you can use Twitter for other purposes as well. Use your followers as a pseudo focus group when considering launching new products or services, or have it be an extension of your customer service strategy by answering questions and complaints.
6. Make judicious use of hashtags. Using the # symbol before keywords at the end of your post creates hashtags that will make your tweets easy to find by non-followers. Strategic use of hashtags also allows you to create logical groups of tweets that others can easily follow. If your company offers a large discount on a different product every week, for example, use a hashtag like #weeklysale when tweeting about it. If you hold an annual convention or trade show, use the hashtag #convention. Ben Parr, editor-at-large of Mashable.com, states that you can also follow current trends on Twitter by using hashtags to get the most out of your Twitter experience.
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