A Beginners Guide to Twitter

In the first of our blogs on Twitter, we go back to basics around the creation of your profile with some hints and tips for using this powerful tool effectively.

Twitter is one of the fastest growing social media networks in the world with 320m monthly active users and 500 million tweets per day on average. Impressive? We think so.

It can be an extremely useful tool for businesses who want to put their messages in front of the eyes of their customers... or potential customers.

If your business isn’t on Twitter yet here are a few tips on how to get started.

Getting started

Go to twitter.com and sign up. First things first, pick your username. You should choose something that is relevant to your business and is easy for your customers to find. Once you make a decision it's time to set up your profile. Every element of your profile should tell your followers who you are and what they should expect from your tweets. Don't forget to show off, make your profile stand out. Put together a clear biography, include a link to your website, your telephone number, upload a profile picture which is clear so that you stand out in the Twitter feed, and background and header images to show who you are.

The optimum size for your Twitter header image should be 1024x512 pixels. Consider that your profile picture will slightly obscure the bottom left section though, so avoid putting important information there. The clever thing to do is to design your header so that the profile picture sits well within it. Remember, the header image should be changed on an ongoing basis, the profile image should remain the same.

Once you are set up there are some basic terms you should get to grips with before starting to promote your business and products.

Some simple terminology

Tweet – 140 characters of text (including spaces). Remember that images take up some of your characters, remember to include links back to your website and also not to make all of your content about you... it will get boring.

ReTweet – Content that you retweet (pass on) to your followers. Be careful not to retweet too much content as users can choose to turn your retweets off. Also, be careful when simply retweeting any interaction which involves your business, it's far better to reply and thank the user for the interaction and then retweet.

#Hashtag – Hashtags are used to help filter tweets so that they are easier to find and so that trends can be detected. They also make for good emotion markers or identifying subject/headlines which draw the user's eye. Hashtags are also useful to use in your business on point of sale such as menus as they will encourage your customers to interact. You can then simply search for the hashtags and interact with the content.

Lists – Twitter Lists are an excellent way to categorise your followers, people that follow you will also add you to lists. Lists can be public or private.

Favourite – You can favourite a tweet so that you can quickly give a nod to some content or easily find it later. Favouriting posts lets you put your profile in front of the eyes of potential customers.

Follow – This is the action that you take when you follow another user. Concentrate on following relevant profiles, don't make the mistake of following loads of people in the hope that they follow you back, organic growth is more effective in the long run.

Follower – This is when someone follows you.