Me interviewed and a Twitter outline for small businesses
July 9th, 2009 | Published in Interviews, Social media
A Portland local news interview with me about Twitter. Below the video is my meeting outline for introducing small companies to Twitter.
The video is embedded below, some browsers have trouble with it, if so view it on their site.
This is my outline for a meeting on the why and how of Twitter. I pair it with a screencast of my computer as I move around the page.
Why social media is important and useful
- Why numbers are not important, involvement is
- Who’s on twitter? A few key examples
Terminology and functions
- Using @
- Lists–creating them and getting added to them
- @ to your account to see who is talking about/with you
- Direct messages (DMs)
- # (hashtags: in general and popular ones to note)
- Retweets (RTs)
- Topic trending
- Favorites
- Each tweet is a url, forever and searchable
Search.twitter.com
- to find mentions of brand or names
- to find other businesses or events
- to find people
More ways of finding people to follow
- Using “Find People” to search for names
- Importing email contact lists
- Seeing who other users follow and talk to
- Search # keywords for your city or topic
Getting people to follow you
- Matching Twitter followers to their newsletter subscriber lists
- Respond to new followers with a hello message and ‘follow us on facebook or visit our website’ message, preferably with a reward such as a discount specific to social media fans of your company
- What to do about spam accounts
Content suggestions: What to tweet?
- Sales or special offers, especially before released to the rest of the public
- Events
- Exclusive or breaking news information–Twitter thrives on up-to-the-moment info and since it’s only 140 characters, you can get a tweet out while you’re still working on a website or blog update
- The importance of looking like a human–don’t push product and talk only about yourself, offer the occasional off topic tweets and engage, engage, engage in conversation
- Using link shrinking sites to turn www.thiscoolsite.com/apostaboutcats into bit.ly/coolsite
Here’s a great tip that can be hard for eager tweeter to remember: Don’t use all 140 characters, because you need to leave room for someone to retweet without your message cutting off. They may want to add something like ‘cool!’ too, which will help spread your tweet.