As of June 2010, about 65 million tweets are posted each day, equaling about 750 tweets sent each second, according to Twitter. See this and more at Twitter on Wikipedia. Just over a year later, Monday, August 01, 2011
Twitter is an immense and free tool. It enables businesses to send messages to its clients at the touch of a button. It enables networking from the armchair. It can grow business and its fun!
Some clients wish to embark on the social media route themselves – often they have used budget on SEO or a new website – and for that very reason here are our top tips for getting started. A guide for beginners.
1) Visit www.twitter.com – this link will take you straight to the sign up screen – create an account and try to name your account using one of your main keywords (eg: FloridaVillasUK, PeopleInnovate rather than JBloggs)
2) Follow lots of others often – use the Twitter suggestions – they will appear by default at first when you log in- usually they will follow you back – often this happens due to Twitter software that is being utilised by many businesses.
3) To find actual individual people who are not representing businesses, and could be potential end-users here is a top tip. See who your competitors have following them. When you follow someone, they often follow you back.
4) Follow groups and followers of groups – for example, a client supplies a home treatment for a common medical condition – find a group which represents the condition or another treatment for it, then follow the group and their followers.
5) Why follow all these people and groups? Without getting technical; more followers heightens the “importance of the twitter page” in Google’s eyes – with the recent developments between Twitter and Google the more likely that your “tweets” get listed by Google in organic results very quickly under the new “real time searching” solution. More followers is good for search engine optimisation, and driving relevant visitors to your website.
6) Hashtags – the term hashtag is used to tag your keyword or keyphrases so that it they can be indexed and searched on. The Twitter help centre has a full explanation of hashtags. If you sell a cure for Osgood Schlatters Disease then your hashtag would be #osgood_schlatters_disease. Example tweet would be “We have a proven cure for #Osgood_Schlatters_Disease which can be found at…….” If your hashtag has more than one word then the words must be separated with an UNDERSCORE – NOT a hyphen as lots of people believe to be the case.
7) Website – to make reference to your website make sure you include the full url – example NOT www.example.co.uk but http://www.example.co.uk
8) Tweets are limited to 140 characters – if you have a particularly long url you can shorten it very quickly. Go to Tiny URL – there are other sites too, enter your long url and click on “Make tiny url” – then copy and paste this into your tweet – may sound long winded but this can be done within a few seconds if you have all tabs opened on your browser.
Here at Calder Web Marketing, we offer a full service Social Media Marketing package which is competitively priced and for SME’s offers above and beyond what most UK web services offer. We also offer Search engine optimisation with social media.