Of all the "big" social networking sites, Twitter is perhaps the least well understood by non-users.
In a nutshell, it is a place where you can send and receive broadcast text messages.
These short texts, called Tweets, are limited to 140 characters each.
Whenever you send one, it will be received by everyone who has signed up to "follow" you.
That is, those who have explicitly opted in to receive the tweets you send out.
The big tradeoff It can take a great deal of time and effort to build a following on Twitter.
Almost no one gets fans to follow them without some form of reciprocation.
For individuals, that reciprocation most often comes in the form of "I'll follow you if you follow me".
For celebrities, it's a matter of remaining famous and entertaining.
For businesses, your best bet is to be useful or very interesting.
Twitter isn't for everyone...
or is it? Almost every business has some kind of useful or interesting information it could share with past and potential future customers.
For example, if you run a restaurant you might tweet your daily specials, advice on food-wine pairings or even share recipes.
A psychologist might tweet daily inspiration and de-stressing exercises.
A tow truck company could tweet car care and road safety tips.
A stationery store could tweet instructions for making paper airplanes, origami sculptures and paperclip monsters.
The only limit is your imagination! Getting around the 140 character limit It's pretty hard to convey any kind of compelling information in 140 characters or less.
Twitter therefore relies heavily on abbreviations.
It also allows URLs which will take users to web sites where no such limitation exists.
In order to get users to want to click on the URL, you're still going to have to provide some inducement.
That might be the promise of something valuable such as a coupon or special offer, it might be to find out the punchline of a joke or the answer to a mystery...
anything you can fit into the 140 character limit.
Most users and companies on Twitter are not especially good at writing interesting tweets.
Which of these actual recent tweets would you rather read?
The second hints that protein, something that I think of as inanimate, takes prisoners.
That sounds fascinating! Just like a newspaper headline has to convince people to buy the whole paper with just a handful of words, your tweets should convince readers to follow the link and read your story.
How often should you tweet? If you expect to use Twitter as a serious business building tool, you should plan to tweet at least once every workday.
Of course if you come up with interesting or informative tidbits more often, even if at irregular intervals, don't hold back! Going back to the example of a tow truck company, if one of your drivers reports a terrible accident on one of the major roadways in your area, tweet that immediately to all your followers.
Likewise if there is snow, flooding, high winds or other conditions which can make driving hazardous.
Or maybe you're a tax accountant and you learn some new loophole in the tax law at a training seminar or over lunch with another accountant, tweet that right on the spot.
There are two reasons why:
For instance, a writer I know specifically writes her articles with retweets in mind.
(More on retweets in a moment.
) Although her blog imposes no limits on article length, format or content, she deliberately laces her articles with short, pithy "sound bites" of 140 characters or less.
She'll even go so far as to include a summary listing of them at the end of her articles in order to encourage readers to pick them up and tweet them.
What the heck are retweets? A retweet is to Twitter what forwarding is to email.
Twitter users who like a tweet can retweet it to all their followers.
It doesn't matter if they got that tweet from the original source or if it was retweeted to them by someone else.
This is the word-of-mouth phenomenon applied to the internet age.
If you write a blog post or other article anywhere online and want to encourage readers to retweet some of the content, here is the format for the link to do that:http://twitter.<br/>com/?status=RT+@[username]%20[tweettext]%20[link] The entire passage above is basically a long internet address (URL).
Therefore, it's not allowed to have spaces.
"%20" is the ANSI code that represents a space.
Web browsers will know how to interpret that and display it correctly.
Remember that everything which comes after the "=" sign must be a grand total of 140 characters or less (with "%20" counting as a single character).
Tweets that get retweeted are usually either entertaining, insightful, surprising, extremely useful or some combination of the above.
Really great tweets can circle the globe in a matter of hours.
What do you suppose something like that might do for your bottom line?
In a nutshell, it is a place where you can send and receive broadcast text messages.
These short texts, called Tweets, are limited to 140 characters each.
Whenever you send one, it will be received by everyone who has signed up to "follow" you.
That is, those who have explicitly opted in to receive the tweets you send out.
The big tradeoff It can take a great deal of time and effort to build a following on Twitter.
Almost no one gets fans to follow them without some form of reciprocation.
For individuals, that reciprocation most often comes in the form of "I'll follow you if you follow me".
For celebrities, it's a matter of remaining famous and entertaining.
For businesses, your best bet is to be useful or very interesting.
Twitter isn't for everyone...
or is it? Almost every business has some kind of useful or interesting information it could share with past and potential future customers.
For example, if you run a restaurant you might tweet your daily specials, advice on food-wine pairings or even share recipes.
A psychologist might tweet daily inspiration and de-stressing exercises.
A tow truck company could tweet car care and road safety tips.
A stationery store could tweet instructions for making paper airplanes, origami sculptures and paperclip monsters.
The only limit is your imagination! Getting around the 140 character limit It's pretty hard to convey any kind of compelling information in 140 characters or less.
Twitter therefore relies heavily on abbreviations.
It also allows URLs which will take users to web sites where no such limitation exists.
In order to get users to want to click on the URL, you're still going to have to provide some inducement.
That might be the promise of something valuable such as a coupon or special offer, it might be to find out the punchline of a joke or the answer to a mystery...
anything you can fit into the 140 character limit.
Most users and companies on Twitter are not especially good at writing interesting tweets.
Which of these actual recent tweets would you rather read?
- List of artificial heat sources
- Proteins take bacterial prisoners
The second hints that protein, something that I think of as inanimate, takes prisoners.
That sounds fascinating! Just like a newspaper headline has to convince people to buy the whole paper with just a handful of words, your tweets should convince readers to follow the link and read your story.
How often should you tweet? If you expect to use Twitter as a serious business building tool, you should plan to tweet at least once every workday.
Of course if you come up with interesting or informative tidbits more often, even if at irregular intervals, don't hold back! Going back to the example of a tow truck company, if one of your drivers reports a terrible accident on one of the major roadways in your area, tweet that immediately to all your followers.
Likewise if there is snow, flooding, high winds or other conditions which can make driving hazardous.
Or maybe you're a tax accountant and you learn some new loophole in the tax law at a training seminar or over lunch with another accountant, tweet that right on the spot.
There are two reasons why:
- It makes it less likely that you'll forget to tweet it later.
- The unpredictability of your messages will actually increase your followers' interest in receiving them.
For instance, a writer I know specifically writes her articles with retweets in mind.
(More on retweets in a moment.
) Although her blog imposes no limits on article length, format or content, she deliberately laces her articles with short, pithy "sound bites" of 140 characters or less.
She'll even go so far as to include a summary listing of them at the end of her articles in order to encourage readers to pick them up and tweet them.
What the heck are retweets? A retweet is to Twitter what forwarding is to email.
Twitter users who like a tweet can retweet it to all their followers.
It doesn't matter if they got that tweet from the original source or if it was retweeted to them by someone else.
This is the word-of-mouth phenomenon applied to the internet age.
If you write a blog post or other article anywhere online and want to encourage readers to retweet some of the content, here is the format for the link to do that:
Therefore, it's not allowed to have spaces.
"%20" is the ANSI code that represents a space.
Web browsers will know how to interpret that and display it correctly.
Remember that everything which comes after the "=" sign must be a grand total of 140 characters or less (with "%20" counting as a single character).
Tweets that get retweeted are usually either entertaining, insightful, surprising, extremely useful or some combination of the above.
Really great tweets can circle the globe in a matter of hours.
What do you suppose something like that might do for your bottom line?
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