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So you’ve heard about Twitter but don’t have an account yet. Why not? Well here are some tips on how you can use Twitter for Business.

Twitter is Easy

Things You Can Do on Twitter

• Search for and follow people and companies that you know.
• Find new people with interesting or similar interests and expertise and follow them.
• Find companies in the same or similar industries or that may be competitors and follow them.
• Let others know what you and your company are doing right now.
• Share interesting links.
• Comment on and “retweet” others’ tweets.
• Find out what others are saying about you and your company.

Twitter Basics

On Twitter, your identity is your “Twitter handle”. This is the user name you have chosen for your account and the accompanying url (i.e. www.twitter.com/encoretele). When you type a username in the context of a Tweet, adding an @ sign to the beginning creates a link to the user’s profile (i.e. @encoretele links to www.twitter.com/encoretele).

A “retweet”, mentioned above, is re-sharing a tweet that someone else has shared.

Ad “Direct Message” or DM is when at twitterer sends a message directly to a user, as opposed to a regular message that goes out to anyone and everyone on Twitter.

For topic keywords, Twitter uses “hashtags”. This is when you add the # symbol at the beginning of a keyword (i.e. #rottweilers). This is the way to categorize tweets to show more easily in a Twitter search.

An excellent way to share a link and maximize those 140 characters is by using a url shortening tool such as bit.ly. This kind of tool takes a long link such as https://support.twitter.com/articles/166337-the-twitter-glossary and shortens it into http://bit.ly/pJICUO.

Promoted Tweets are ordinary Tweets paid for by advertisers that are pushed to the top of relevant search results pages on twitter.com. The advertiser would pay to be promoted using a specific keyword or hashtag so that when searchers query the hashtag, the promoted tweet will show among the search results.

And finally, don’t toot your own horn too much. Sharing Tweets not directly related to business is important and others will be more likely to retweet interesting and personally relevant content. If you insist on talking about your business very frequently, try to balance it out by promoting the heck out of others, too. Remember tweeters have humans behind them and they are annoyed and bored by all the same things as regular people.

Sources:
http://www.chrisbrogan.com/50-ideas-on-using-twitter-for-business/.
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/10-innovative-ways-to-use-twitter-for-business/
http://mashable.com/2010/04/20/twitter-for-business/
http://mashable.com/guidebook/twitter/