Thursday, January 23, 2014

Starting a Twitter Account, Step One

Okay, so it might not be the first step since you need to register an account, choose a username, upload a profile picture and header photo, write a bio, add a website and change your background photo.

Those are the basics. Search "How to start a Twitter account" and you will get pages and pages and pages of these steps.

But the most important step is the next one. It is the step I make every client take and I insist on it. If they don't do it there is no reason to keep working with me, and no reason to have a Twitter account.



You MUST follow a minimum of 100 people right away.

Twitter, for the average small business, is best used as a networking tool. It's a fantastic way to meet other local businesses, members of the media, and potential clients. It's about conversation.

But many people only tweet sporadically, sometimes at the end of the day while home and relaxing, sometime first thing in the morning while travelling to work, and some tweet all day because they have a job which keeps them on a computer all day.

I started a Twitter account months ago for Circle of Media. I wanted to make sure that nobody else would use the name. I've built a pretty solid following on my own Twitter account Cinn48 and so didn't really use the business one. But now that I've been blogging every day I've decided to start promoting the content, and my business, a bit more.

So, about a week ago, I started following people and sending out tweets from the Circle of Media account. And I'm realizing exactly how important my own suggestion to my clients is.

I did it a few at a time, but over the course of a couple days I got my Following count over 100. And as far as I'm concerned it's still too few people to start having meaningful conversations.

When everyone is tweeting only links to their own blogs, or even links to news articles there isn't always a lot to say back about it. It's difficult to get to know someone based on what they link to.

Which leads to step two. Give people something to talk to you about. Let people know a little something about yourself.


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