Tweeting is the latest, greatest way to market your business. Tweeting is done via Twitter, a social media outlet that began as a microblogging platform in 2006 with the first tweet from one of its creators, Jack Dorsey (his Twitter handle is @Jack).
Twitter has subsequently blossomed into a national gossip source, spreading the news of disasters, joys, and everything in between. Politicians even use it to campaign and to elicit public support for their programs, Twitter has also become a wonderful platform for businesses to use to spread the word about their products. Twitter is now worth between $5 and $10 billion and growing.
Rather than writing letters or even emails, Twitter users can just tie 140 words together and tweet about any- and everything. Tweets are heard round the world and with all the tweeting going on, your business should take full advantage and come up with a strategy and ideas that will expand your social media presence and connect you with your future customers.
How to tweet
- In order to effectively tweet you need to learn about hashtags and how to properly use them. A hashtag is a short link preceded by the pound sign, or hash (#). Any word or group of words that follows a hashtag is automatically turned into a link you can use to search for all other Twitter posts about that subject.
- Some characters are accepted in tweets, and some are not:
- There can be no spaces in your hashtag. If you are selling a pet camera called the DogTek EYENIMAL tiny Pet Video Cam, you would list it in a tweet as #DogTekEYENIMALtinyPetVideoCam.
- Uppercase letters are okay to use and can make your link look more readable, as in the Dog Tek Pet Cam.
- Numbers are also okay to use, as in #50WaysToCookSpaghetti.
- Punctuation marks and special characters are NOT acceptable. This includes: periods, commas, colons semi-colons, apostrophes, question marks, exclamation marks, asterisks, and all other special characters and punctuation marks.
- The one exception to the use of special characters is the @ symbol. It is used before a people’s Twitter handle if you want to tweet directly to them.
- It is recommended that you use no more than three hashtags in a post, but they can be used to convey excitement, disdain, sarcasm, and many other emotions.
- Get a Twitter account for your business and make it public so everyone can see your tweets.
- Check on what hashtags your competitors are using and use them in your posts.
- In your business you likely follow the trends, so share those trends in your posts.
- Find conversations that deal with the products you carry and join them.
Twitter has a guide called Best Practices that offers a lot of good information to help you do more with your tweets. Twitter can be a powerful resource for your business, but you need to be willing to set aside the time to use it properly. Once you do, you will find people tweeting about your products.
