Twitter for Small Business

Twitter is another great & free tool for connecting to people for small business and personal use whether it be for business promotion or to stay in touch with friends & family. Although only recently getting covering in the main stream media such as recent coverage in the Sydney Morning Herald, Twitter has just celebrated it’s 3rd birthday and connects over a million people (some estimates are over 10 times that amount)

from twitter.com

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?

twitter can be used from the internet, via third party free computer applications such as tweetdeck, mobile phone and is a very easy way to stay in communication. you can make friends with people from your area, potential customers, monitor what people are saying about your brand and share information very easily

in coming months we will be providing some idreas & tips about how to use twitter effectively, to start, here is a “How To” on setting up twitter

Prepare

Collect the information you will use on your twitter profile. Click here for a sample of what Cairns Business Help’s twitter profile looks like

• Full Name
• Username (maximum 15 characters)
• Password
• Email
• Timezone (Cairns is in the Brisbane GMT+10 timezone)
• Website URL
• Online Bio (160 characters maximum)
• Location
• Business logo graphic
• background page design and colours

Step by Step

If you would like to see twitter’s own getting started video “Twitter in Plain English” then click here to go to the video

• Go to https://twitter.com/signup and enter the details
• Check your email at this point for a welcome email from twitter
• The next step allows you to import your contacts from your email address books, we prefer to finish completing our profile first, and adding a few messages first so that your contacts have more reason to add you and read your updates, so click on skip this step and go back to it later
• You will then be presented with a list of people you may want to follow, keep or remove the ticks next to the twitter contacts or skip the step entirely
• Next click on settings in the top menu bar and fill out the details you collected previously, unless you intend to use twitter to pass on sensitive information to your followers only, then we recommend against protected updates (bottom of settings page), as google and potential customers can’t see them
• Click on save at the bottom of the screen, then click on picture at the top and upload your business logo - this will work best if your logo or graphic is square, as twitter will crop your logo to make it fit their application
• Click on save, then click on design in the top bar to upload your background graphic and colours for your twitter page
• Now that you are all set up, click on Find people in the very top menu on twitter - there are 4 different tabs toward the top of the page to help you find people from twitter, other networks, via email invite and suggested twitter users
• Now you are all set up and ready to send messages to your twitter account and your network of followers there. Simply go to the twitter home page at http://twitter.com, login with your username and password, fill out the “What are you doing?” box and click on the update button.

There will be some more posts in coming months about how best to use twitter to promote a business, stay in contact with friends, find the latest news and even request songs on radio stations.

If anything is unclear or you would like specific help with twitter or other Social Media applications then please leave a comment below or contact Cairns Business Help directly.

And of course if you would like to follow Cairns Business Help on twitter, just click here and add us.

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