Twitter for Dummies (30 page)

Don’t be afraid to voice your support for social causes and charities. By tweeting about your cause, you both spread awareness about what’s important to you (which may lead to more contributions for that cause or charity) and give your audience a better idea of who you are as a person.

So, if you’re passionate about cancer research, domestic violence, or another cause and want to have a fundraiser for it, a Twitter update that you send about the fundraiser might get repeated and reach 50, 500, 5,000 or 50,000 people (or more) who are directly and indirectly connected to you. Spread the love!

Many have raised money for worthy causes right on Twitter. One of the first was Beth Kanter (
@kanter
) whose network sent a Cambodian woman to college in a matter of a few hours of Twitter conversation about it and links to a donation site. For more about Twitter and charity, see Chapter 15.

Keeping Twitter Personal . . . but Not Too Personal

Above all else, remember that Twitter is a public forum. Even when you’re talking to your trusted Twitter network, your tweets are very much public, Google and other search engines still index them, and anyone on the Web can link to them.

You can adjust your settings to prevent search engines and the occasional passerby from viewing your updates by protecting your account. See Chapter 2 for details.

All the public exposure that Twitter offers can really help promote you and your business, but that exposure also comes with some responsibilities:

Use common sense!
Don’t publicly tweet or @reply someone your address, phone number, or other personal details that you should keep private. Send that kind of information via DM (direct message) — or, even better, via e-mail, instant message, or phone. Keeping your personal details private protects both you and anyone in your care, such as your kids.

Use DMs cautiously.
Typing
d
username
and then your message does send a private direct message from any Twitter interface. But trust us, if you made a typo or wrote
dm
username
, you would not be the first person to accidentally post a private DM publicly.

To avoid accidental updates, make it a habit to use the Message button on a user’s page, double-check your
d
username
tweets before posting or use
http://twitter.com/direct_messages
to send DMs. You want to be extremely careful if you decide to send sensitive information by DM. Better yet, use an even more secure medium like e-mail or even encryption.
Never
send passwords, credit card numbers, social security numbers, or other valuable private data by Twitter (or even e-mail, for data that secure).

Maintain boundaries.
Try to be aware of how you are (or aren’t) maintaining boundaries with the people you interact with frequently on Twitter. Especially before you agree to meet someone in person, take a look at how you’ve interacted in the past and make sure that you’ve kept your relationship clear from the start, whether it’s for business or friendship.

Protecting personal details

Many people opt to not even use the real names of family members or children who don’t use Twitter. Twitterers commonly refer to relatives, friends, and kids by nicknames or initials, just to give those loved ones a layer of protection. Use a bit of caution and ask permission before tweeting someone’s real name (or any other information that we mention). Laura, for example, uses her daughters’ initials S and Z, as shown in Figure 10-7. Twitter is a powerful influence on search engines, so casual mentions of unique names remain findable for a long time. If Laura even used their first names on her tweets (which all also contain her last name), they’d likely appear visibly in Google search results for their firstname lastname. Don’t believe her? A Google search for Z Fitton brings up two recent tweets about her antics.

The same words of caution go for any number of personal details. Dive into information about your health or your private life in private conversation. Although being authentic and a little bit personal goes a long way on Twitter, everyone understands that you need a layer of privacy to keep you, your loved ones, and the details about them safe.

Figure 10-7:
Laura (
@pistachio
) referencing her spawn in a tweet.

Maximizing privacy and safety

After you Twitter for a while, you’ve given away a lot of information about yourself. If you mention who you spend time with or that you always hang out at a certain cafe, someone can start tracking where you’ve been and what you’re doing. We don’t want to scare you — but whenever you post in a public medium, anyone could go through the information you’ve published, later on, and start piecing things together. Laura loves the unique charms of her neighborhood and street, but she keeps the details really fuzzy, preferring Boston as specific enough.

Chapter 11

Twitter for Business

In This Chapter

Putting your business on Twitter

Using Twitter to make your business look good

Creating a network on Twitter and communicating with it

Getting and giving useful information on Twitter

So, you want to find out more about what Twitter can do for your business. In this chapter, we cover some of the essentials, explain what some other businesses have tried, and point you in the right direction to get started yourself.

The Business of Twitter

People often ask Laura, “What’s the business use of Twitter?” Laura frequently answers with a different question, “What’s the business use of e-mail?” It’s not that the technologies are similar or play the same role; it’s that Twitter has the potential to filter into every possible aspect of business as a versatile communications platform and problem-solving tool. Both technologies are extremely open communication platforms that have uses way beyond the marketing and customer-engagement layer. Twitter can impact pretty much everything, from the way enterprise software works to how project status is shared. It can fundamentally change communication and problem-solving, as well as match resources, accommodate HR challenges, and lower expenses. Most of the potential business applications of Twitter are just starting to become understood.

Twitter can have powerful effects on personal and professional networks. Sales professionals can use it to generate leads, journalists to locate sources, publishers to discover new content, or any business to create better relationships with customers. You can listen to and harness the massive flow of ideas and information passing through Twitter so that you can advance your business objectives.

You can use Twitter to create ad-hoc communities, organize and publicize live events, or extend an experience to a remote audience. You can sell directly — if you do it right — or you can just develop an inexpensive listening and conversation post among the very people whose problems your business solves. You can use Twitter to generate traffic to your business’s Web site. You can use it to solicit feedback. It can even make your company and brands easier for users to find on search engines such as Google.

First, it helps to take a look at some ways Twitter might fit with your brand.

Putting Your Best Face Forward

Businesses can use Twitter to talk to their customers and potential customers, and generally increase brand recognition. Given that Twitter has so many potential uses that are so diverse, how can you get started?

You can probably guess that your profile is your business’s face on Twitter. Even though many people use Twitter through a service on their phone or desktop, rather than through the Web page itself, assume that most everyone will at least look at your Profile page — if not the Web URL that you provide within that profile — before deciding whether or not to follow what you’re doing on Twitter.

Dress nicely on Twitter: Fill out the whole Profile page when you set up your business’s Twitter account and upload an avatar (in some cases, your company logo is appropriate, but in others an individual photo is better). Link back to your main Web site, and in turn, link to your Twitter account from your Web site. You need to verify that the business account is actually yours and promote the availability of the Twitter stream to all your customers. With a widget on your site, you can even tweet to your customers (keeping freshly updated content front and center) without them having ever even heard of Twitter.

Make sure that the Twitter Bio section, short though it may be, tells Twitter users about your business. Also, the content of your business’s tweets needs to honestly, transparently show what you’re doing on Twitter. Introduce the people behind your business’s Twitter account — they’re the people your Twitter readers and connections actually talk to, so let the individuals behind the keyboard shine through. (For more on polishing your profile, turn to Chapter 2.)

After you create a great Profile page, what do you do? Here are a few simple ways to get out of the Twitter background and into public awareness:

Listen.
Pay attention to what’s going on around you on Twitter. Twitter users have fascinating things to say about pretty much everything, but more importantly for you, they may already be talking about you and your business. You’re going to want to find as many ways as you can to tune in. From using Twitter Search to sophisticated social-media listening tools, (see Chapter 9) you can get useful information from Twitter in many ways. If you think of Twitter as a giant consumer sentiment engine, you can start to understand its potential. You can learn a lot by listening.

Balance.
For the average business Twitter account, you need to have a good ratio of personal (or conversational) tweets to business (or promotional) ones. This ratio depends, in part, on how much you interact on Twitter and what you hope to accomplish — not to mention the nature of your business and your target audience or customer base.

You may want to come up with an approximate numerical ratio that accomplishes your balance goals. You might want to decide, for example, that you can make only one or two of every ten tweets personal. Alternately, you can opt to put a particularly personal or original slant on promotional tweets, making them notably funny, valuable, or interesting to your readers.

If you have a more conversational Twitter account that you still want to connect to your professional life, make about half your tweets personal, fun, or off-topic, and the other half about your business. If you prefer to deliver business value all the time, set up your account to curate and cultivate links about events, essays, news, and ideas that are relevant to your field, in addition to promotional tweets so that you can still push your brand (without making that the only thing you do). Whatever you do, be useful. Offer value. You want to keep people engaged, which is what Twitter is all about.

Engage.
While you listen and talk on Twitter, be sure to also interact with other twitterers. Twitter is a communications tool, and although it’s based on a one-to-many concept, it works best when you make friends and have real conversations right in the Twitter stream. Sometimes when you find people talking about subjects relevant to your business you can offer helpful contributions to their conversations! When it comes to business, public relations, and customer service (which we talk about in the following sections), you absolutely need to engage other people on Twitter.

Connect.
Use the ability to take conversations offline and into the real world via tweetups, events, and meetings to your business’s advantage. Twitter makes finding ways to meet and engage with customers in real life easy, and therein lies its largest business value. Bring your business’s conversations and connections beyond the 140-character limit.

Public relations

You can use Twitter as a fantastic public-relations channel, whatever kind of business you work for. It offers global reach, endless connections, networking opportunities, a promotion platform, and immediate event planning and feedback. Best of all, if you float your ideas out there in genuine, valid, and interesting ways, others can pick them up and spread them around. Many Twitterers — from individuals to large corporations — report scoring numerous press opportunities as a result of engaging other Twitterers and sharing on the Twitter platform.

Some traditional public relations firms may be intimidated by Twitter’s potential to connect stories, sources, and journalists. Many of them don’t yet see the opportunity, or they’re thinking about it too narrowly. Twitter is just one more tool — albeit a powerful and efficient one — to add to your arsenal if public relations is important to your business. Twitter simply gives you a way to make what you do more accessible to people who might otherwise not hear your message.

You may have heard about Twitter in the first place in the context of a mainstream news story about an event of global importance that was first reported via citizen journalism on Twitter — such as the emergency landing of a commercial airplane in the Hudson River in January 2009. Indeed, Twitter is an exceedingly powerful tool for detecting breaking events. You don’t always get in-depth analysis (at least, not until links to longer writings about the story begin to spread), but you do frequently find yourself way ahead of the game when a story breaks if you’re on Twitter.

Journalists and PR practitioners are among some of Twitter’s most avid users, and they do some pretty interesting things with it. On Monday nights, professionals from both sides of the field gather to talk about current stories, their professions, and the future of media, all by simply tagging their tweets with the word
#journchat
. Because
#journchat
is an agreed-on tag and a longstanding event, people know to point their search tools (or
http://search.twitter.com
) at that word and watch the conversation scroll by.

It was Twitter innovator
@PRSarahEvans
who came up with the idea for
#journchat
, and the community she built catapulted her from obscure community college PR practitioner to an extremely well-known social-media innovator. John A. Byrne (
@JohnAByrne
) of
BusinessWeek
implemented a similar standing event (Wednesday nights, for those of you playing along at home) when he went onto Twitter one night to answer questions and encouraged the use of the
#editorchat
hashtag.

Because Twitter usernames are short and frequently easy to remember, they can be a powerful way to introduce people and pass along contact information. In an interview, a reporter was surprised how easily Laura could rattle off half a dozen sources whom the reporter might like to talk to. Armed with these Twitter handles, the journalist used the profiles behind those usernames to get a quick snapshot of those users’ interests, abilities, and points of view, plus links to further detailed information about them and an easy way to make contact.

Here are some tips to make your Twitter-based public relations more user-friendly and successful:

Keep it real!
The be-genuine Twitter rule applies at all times, even when you’re embarking on a publicity campaign (often
especially
when you’re attempting to drive sales or awareness to your product, service, or site). Twitter’s users can be very turned off by empty marketing banter.

Remember your balance.
Just because you want to see fast results doesn’t mean that you should bombard your Twitter followers with
link spam
(numerous tweets that contain links to your business) or constant nagging about whatever you’re trying to promote. Remember to space it out. On Twitter, overly aggressive promotions can slow your progress and reduce your audience. Tread with respect.

Give your idea wings.
Come up with a pithy or witty statement about your promotion that inspires people in your network to share and pass it along (to
retweet
the statement, or RT) to their own networks. Getting your message retweeted is much more effective than hammering your point home on your own.

Be genuinely helpful.
Watch for conversations about topics relevant to your company or product, and provide unselfish solutions, ideas, and help to those conversations.

Listen to feedback.
If someone asks you a question, answer it in your own public feed so that you can continue to generate organic interest in your promotion. Answer others who happen to tweet related questions, but make sure that your answers aren’t selfish or too pushy. How can you tell? Watch for effectiveness. Do people click your links? Do they retweet your messages without you having to ask? Do they complain that you’re being promotional, or worse, do they just not say much at all? Use trackable link shorteners so that you can see which of your tweets people are bothering to click or, even better, retweeting themselves (and passing your messages along for you). Sometimes, you may need to tweet a little less frequently to avoid letting spamminess make you less effective.

Offer incentives.
We don’t mean free giveaways or money, but value. Give people an unselfish reason to pay attention to you. It takes more than just promotions. Followers listen to you for the value you add, and if you consistently add insightful and worthwhile thoughts to their Twitter streams, they’ll be there for you when the roles reverse and you need them.