How to make Twitter Work For You, When You Think it's Not Valuable!.

I teach a technology course and in the fourth week of the course, we delve into marketing and social media and what role IT plays with online marketing. Since I was preparing this little "lecturette" to share with my students next week, I figured I would write it down here first. Every time I teach this course, I challenge the students to set up a Twitter account and use it for seven straight days. I then ask them to summarize what they found beneficial and what they didn't find beneficial with using Twitter. In almost every class, the majority of the students have not used Twitter. After the "Twitter Project" as I call it ended, 9/10 students always come back saying they will never use it again, they didn't find it useful.

So, I'm writing down these tips for them to use as a guideline on their 7-day Twitter journey so I can see if it raises the rate of "will use it" responses.

Personal Use

1. Choosing the Right Application: I strongly recommend using a Twitter application that gives you the ability to use it on your desktop or phone to give you control over the way information comes to you via Twitter. My personal favorite is TweetDeck (http://www.tweetdeck.com/). There are plenty of other applications to use and I will share those in the business use section of tips. The reason that I personally like TweetDeck is that it gives me the opportunity to search "key words" and create a column in the application based on those keywords. That way I can read posts that are about certain topics that I am interested in reading. This gives me control so I am not wading through tons of postings trying to find a topic of interest.
2. Who to Follow: Okay, there are some of us who love certain celebrities, so it is not uncommon to choose celebs to follow. I will admit I jumped on the Ashton Kutcher bandwagon and started following him when he had the bet CNN that he could get to 1 million followers than they did. I do follow a few celebrities but I'm picky about what I want to see. Yes, that's just me. You may have sports players that you like, or personalities that you like, etc. That's the cool thing about Twitter, you control who you follow. I also find people to follow based on my topics of interest. I also LOVE Mashable (@mashable). Their stories and blogs are about leveraging social media. You can also follow companies like Apple, Motorola, and many, many other companies. When you set up your Twitter account for the first time, use the web application to get a listing of categories to choose from.
3. Your Followers: When you are notified that someone is following you, check out their postings in their bio, you might find that they tweet about topics that interest you.
4. What Do I Say: To me, this is almost like the dilemma I had with friends on Facebook. I could care less if you had spaghetti tonight. I mean, that's all "I had spaghetti tonight". BORING! Now, if you had capellini pomodora tonight at the new restaurant in town, you are giving that business a boost. You can tweet about stories you have read that are interesting, you can retweet someone else's post that you are following to share with your group of followers. Just make sure it's not drivel. If you blog, tweet your blog if you want people to read it.

Business Use (Small Businesses)

1. Choosing the Right Application: My viewpoint on this is from a small business perspective and how small businesses can compete with the "big boys" with lots of money in their advertising budget. SEO has a great list of the top 10 Twitter application (http://www.seo-smo.net/2011/09/29/10-best-twitter-applications-tools/). You have to decide which tool is best for you. Do you need to track metrics of who are mentioning your products? As a business using Twitter, I would recommend an application that does track and trend so you know if you are reaching your target audience. I would also recommend that you use an application that allows you to schedule tweets so you don't have to log in certain times a day. If you are featuring a sale on products, you can create tweets that will be delivered at the time you want with that sale. This is invaluable since you need to be working instead of watching Twitter or remembering that you wanted to post at 3PM.
2. Getting People to Follow You: If you are in business, chances are if you are using Twitter you are using it to drive traffic to your website. It's important to choose keywords, just like search engine optimization, for those people who use keywords to find topics of interest to them. Using Twitter for my business meant that I wanted to choose very specific words for people to find me.
3. Linkbacks: Not only do you want people who use Twitter to find you, you also want to use Twitter so that your profile comes up in the search engines. This really good blog has some great tips for linkbacks: (http://blogdesignstudio.com/blogging-tips/17-simplest-ways-of-building-the-easy-and-free-link-backs/). I cannot stress how important it is to leverage linkbacks to your website your blog, etc.
4. Create a Blog: Since you are limited on Twitter to how much you say, use a blog to post pictures and write up information about products, sales, etc. Then post your blog link to Twitter using a few keywords. People then linkback to your blog and they get to read the whole "shebang" about what you are doing.
5. Strategy: Last and definitely the first thing is to define your strategy to determine how social media marketing is going to work for your business. That should be your first step in this whole process.

This information barely scratches the surface of using Twitter for your business. As with any business strategy you embark on, it's important to do your research so that you set up your social media strategy that will work best for you. Start with reputable journals and blogs on leveraging social media to wade through the mire to find the information that best suits your business needs.
Happy Tweeting!