A Little Birdie Told Me: The Twitter Primer
Twitter: What are you doing?
I was extremely resistant when I first heard about Twitter. I visited the site several times, checked out a few articles about it, and approached it with the same caution I did Facebook; I didn’t want to have to worry about yet another site that I’d have to keep track of every day. This in spite of the fact that my wife was on it long before I even looked at the site and touted its benefits in communicating with her faculty peers at her university.
Not to mention, I just didn’t get it. It’s not that I didn’t understand Twitter; the basic concept is simple and follows the “Web 2.0” mantra perfectly: simple, social and ever-evolving. The question I asked myself after all my research was why, either personally or professionally, would people ever care about what I was doing at that moment?
Before I get too philosophical and explain the reasons why I now think Twitter is a good tool after all for small business, let’s get acquainted with it if you haven’t already.
What is Twitter?
As per Twitter’s home page, “Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?” Your response to that question, called a “Tweet,” is limited to 140 characters, so there’s no room for verbose responses, and can give your followers a brief peek into your life. And while one post might not give anyone a deeper relationship with you (or your business), multiple posts over the day give more insight into what interests you and, if you’re doing it for business, how you can help them.
There’s a great video on the Twitter site, available before you log in via a “watch video” button, that sort of overviews the purpose of Twitter and the kind of people who might care to use it. Click here to go to YouTube in a new window to see it (I couldn’t embed it due to copyright restrictions, sorry!).
Getting Started
The sign-up form you have to fill out to start tweeting.
Okay, so now you have an idea of what it is, and you need to get started. Click the “Get Started – Join!” button on the home page and fill in the basic information it requests. You’ll need to be sure and pick a unique username and email address, and if you’re doing this for your business, you may want to register separately for personal and business use.
The sign-up and setup process is fairly straightforward from there, and the Twitter team does a really good job of laying the steps needed to set up your basic account. You can change your settings to include a profile picture, a custom background for your Twitter page, a brief bio and a link to your home page, blog, or any other site you wish.
The real addiction for many, however, will begin if you decide to link your phone to your Twitter account to receive SMS text messages every time you receive a Tweet. You can set it up such that you receive a message every time a tweet appears, or only if you receive messages directed specifically at you, but in either case you can tweet on the go. Setup is simple and doesn’t cost anything.
The Good: Share and Share Alike
Twitter is a great resource for sharing information. I’ve been on it for about a week now, and I’ve gotten links to articles that I likely never would have seen using the typical methods for finding information on the web. I know of several people using Twitter as a means of communications within groups of people. Imagine, for example, you set up a twitter account as a central hub of communication for your company (e.g. “avelient”). You have each employee join with a company user ID (for example, “mdavelient” would be my employee Twitter ID). Each employee follows the “avelient” user, and boom — you have a way of instantly communicating brief messages to all employees without burdening their mailbox. Better still, if you can connect their mobile devices, then you have a great way of keeping in touch with your workforce if they are mobile — and they can follow each other too. If the phone number changes, the employee need only update their Twitter account and everyone else on the network will now text to the new phone.
There are countless other examples of where this technology can be used to better communicate with people around the world. Avelient just added a feed of twitter updates on our main web site. You can see our 3 most recent Twitter posts and even elect to follow us if you wish. As long as just one of those posts provides good information for a prospect just visiting the site, they may choose to follow us, which could eventually lead them to interact with us, either on Twitter or email, and eventually become a customer. It’s all part of the customer’s ability to control their interaction with you, and being able to “opt in” to your communications rather than having marketing material thrust at them without wanting it first.
The Bad: Self-Promotions, Etiquette and Time-sucking
Some people use Twitter as a method for shameless self-promotion. While that can be part of your presence, Twitter and other social media outlets are about sharing all kinds of information, not just that which you produce. You can be “unfollowed” as quickly as you are “followed” if you’re not providing any kind of insight or value in your posts. (The one exception to this, I found, were celebrities, of which there are several on Twitter.)
There are literally a thousand other articles out there that will help you with your Twitter etiquette. PC Magazine posted its own “Top 13 Twitter Don’ts” just today alone, and there are new articles coming out on it every day. Even after having really only used the site for about a week, I’m already developing some pet peeves with the system.
The biggest problem is that Twitter can be an enormous time-waster, especially for those of us who spend time on a computer all day. My advice: right now, nobody is going to be posting anything on Twitter that you must get to right away. If you’re delving in, set aside short “Twitter Times” per day, where you can look at links posted by other people and post a few things yourself, maybe things you can re-tweet. If you don’t, you’ll find a constant stream of interruptions on your desktop, which will have an impact on your productivity.
The Ugly: Spam
Sad to say, but there are users on Twitter who have a spam-like quality to them.
Part of Twitter etiquette works on the concept of reciprocity; that is, if I post for you, please post for me, or if I follow you, please follow me. Reciprocity isn’t required in order to maintain your Twitter account, but it does give you a better reputation within the community.
Spammers leverage this concept and attempt to get your ear by following you. The thought is that you may blindly follow them in order to get the number of followers in your list increased with little effort. Once you follow them, you’ll notice their posts center around just one or two subjects, probably about the item they’re marketing. It works because they prey on everybody, but new people to Twitter are particularly drawn by their lure.
WordPress, the freely available blog software, will come installed with this excellent plug-in called Akismet, which automatically moves comments that comes from known Spam sources into a “holding area” for a few days before they’re deleted. It works by examining all comments from outside sources and trying to match it up against a massive database of spam that it keeps. If it finds a match, you never have to see the comment. It’s the one big thing that I think is missing from Twitter; a smart way to filter out, or at least identify, users in the system that send nothing but spam.
So…should you do it?
Much like “Carla,” in the video I was skeptical about using the service even after I first signed up, but I decided to take the plunge after all because more and more customers and prospects are asking if they should be on Twitter. I’m still not entirely convinced of Twitter’s value to the small business owner, but if you can strike a balance between regular posts about yourself that people will find interesting and knowing when to retweet (that’s a tweet that you republished from another user, with an RT at the start followed by that other user’s ID, e.g. “RT @avelient: Read this blog!”), your business could benefit from extra publicity. Perhaps in a down economy with businesses slowing down a bit, it’s the perfect opportunity to take on the challenge, and you could always siphon it off to someone trustworthy within your organization later.
In the meantime, I’m going to talk to my friend Sam, whom I’m following, about a social media conference he just tweeted about. Could prove a good resource for my company that I never would have found out about if I were not following him.
Meanwhile, if you want to follow us, you can do so @avelient. See you in the Twitterverse!
Further Reading
How to Be a Better Tweeter – A CNET.com article about how to do more with your Twitter account.
The Twitter Follow Basics for Small Business – Sam Howat, a friend of ours over at Bluetux in Washington State, beat me to the punch yesterday and posted a great article on growing your presence on Twitter. Check it out. Follow him @BLUETUX.
First UK Chinese Restaurant to Use Twitter for Business – Jane Hart of the Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies in the UK posted this article about how a Chinese restaurant uses Twitter to create buzz for their food and their special events. Follow her @c4lpt.
(For books, please note: Unless this is a review on a specific book, I have not necessarily read the books I list for further reading. I simply look for related books on amazon and put them here for your convenience.)
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