How do I use twitter?

Ok so what about Twitter? Following up from my previous blog post 'How do I use Linkedin?' I did the same for Twitter. I typed into Google 'How do I use Twitter?'. So this time I was delighted to find this upbeat YouTube video link that takes you through all the elements of setting up and using Twitter with visual references too.

Yes it does whiz by a little quickly but you can play it again and again as many times as you like. So again a good place to start.

I think it's probably worth mentioning that you may get the most out of Twitter for business by using it as a news alert mechanism that always includes a link to something of more interest or usefulness to you followers. Whether that be a link to your own business website, an article you have written on say a blog, or even to one of your many 'information portals' also known as 'microsites' or 'splash pages'.

Ultimately it's a great way to point people in the right direction when you have something to say that will help them in some way.

Social Media Pets

If you are going to have them you must feed them!

We are being told left, right and centre that we should be blogging or tweeting or linked-in. Some of us have Facebook profiles which are easy for personal use to dip in and out of as we wish but from a business perspective does that do more harm than good?

I do believe that these social media presences are like pets and they need feeding regularly. You'll see that this is my first blog post since before Christmas. Slap. My social media pets have almost died of starvation so my aim is to feed snippets every other week and larger feasts at least once a month.

So rather than sign up to all of them at once why not start off with one, get into the habit of feeding it little and often or at a set time each week and then when that is second nature to you and easy to manage, you can perhaps introduce another.

Linked in, I would say is a good starting point. You can set a profile (yes you should put a photo up on it), add events that you go to, put a small snippet of what you are up to and make connections. This then gives you other examples of what to update people about.

The reason I think a photo is important is that transparency is a good thing. I like to know who I am talking to and like many people I meet networking, I'm terrible at remembering which names go with which faces.

You can also style your profiles to fit your brand. This can be done with photo's logos and backgrounds and they needn't be expensive to create either.