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Twitter Marketing – How to Get Started

Jason Katzenback — Tue, 05 May 2009 16:43:33 +0000

Selecting Your Twitter Identity

One of the first things you need to know in order to get started on Twitter is what your user name will be. You’ll need to put some thought into this; your user name is what everybody will use to identify with you, and it’s not very wise to change later (in terms of followers) once you get going.

You can use your user name as an opportunity to tie your twitter account into your online brand. If you’ve got an established persona (like, say John Cow) use that. If you’re best known as yourself (and that’s what you want to promote), then go with that.

I’d avoid using the product you’re ultimately going to promote as your user name – it will make everything you say seem like you’re trying to sell something, and that is not the way to be successful with social marketing. Plus, you may decide to promote another product at another time, and you don’t want to have to start all over again. It’s important that, whatever name you choose, real or persona, that you come across as genuine in both your profile and posts.

Although you can change your user name later, once you start using the new one, your old one becomes available for someone else to use it. If you do feel that you have to change your user name once you’re signed up, make sure to do it early on before you build a following. It also is a pain if you are using other services that need to log in to your twitter account, as they will stop working once your user name is changed.

Another thing you could do is simply start another Twitter account with another email address, and keep the first one dormant. It will keep anyone from swooping in and taking your name. You could also do this proactively with several names in order to keep people from starting accounts that relate to your brand name.

If you do not have a brand and do not want to use your name then pick a specific keywords for your Twitter account that represents your market, it will help your account rank high in search for that keyword. The search engines are loving Twitter and for example, my Twitter account shows up 3rd in Google for the term “johncow”… which of course of that brand i am using

When looking for keywords, I recommend that you try to find a solid two-phrase keyword phrase that represents your niche and gets good traffic. You, of course, will want to promote your Twitter page with that keyword too… but we get into that later. You also want it to be something easy to remember.. but be prepared to get frustrated because just like domains, a lot of good names have been registered and next to nothing is on them. A good example is http://twitter.com/holistichealth, that would be a great twitter account to own if you were in that niche and the person who registered this, has not made a post since October 2008. You will want to to create a list of 20 or more keywords and use all variations available. An example is…

holistichealth
healthholistic
holistic-health
health-holistic
holistic_health
health_holistic

Creating Your Twitter Account

Go to https://twitter.com/signup to create your account or click on the “Get Started – Join” button at http://twitter.com/.

The information they ask for to sign up is pretty simple – full name, user name, password, and email address. As you move through the fields, Twitter will let you know if your choices are acceptable (i.e. a user name that’s not taken, an appropriate password, etc.)

Once you’re signed up, you’ll need to fill out your profile area. It is very important to have as complete a profile as possible; people don’t like to follow people with no information in their profile. Upload a photo or image to use as an avatar; this will also help you gain more followers. You can either use a real image of yourself, or a logo, or other image associated with your brand, or even a stock photo that fits the image you’re trying to create. Anything is better than the Twitter default.

When you’re filling out your profile, you’ll see a box that says “Protect my Updates.” If you choose this, all of your posts and messages will not appear in the public timeline, and can only be seen by people you are following or who are following you. Since you’re signing up to Twitter to promote yourself and your business, I do NOT recommend you do this.

Twitter will also ask you if you want to find friends (contacts) that you have through Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail, or MSN. Twitter will search through the contacts that you have in the chosen account, and tell you which ones are already signed up for Twitter. You can always return to this later if you won’t want to do this right away.

Twitter will also show you a list of suggested contacts. This usually includes the more popular Twitter accounts, mostly celebrities and large companies. You can follow these if you like, but it’s unlikely that many of them will follow you back. A better idea is to try and find people within your niche, and follow them. You can do that by searching on a keyword relevant to your category at https://twitter.com/invitations/find_on_twitter or search http://www.twellow.com/

Once you’ve got your profile done and updated your contacts (if you chose to) then you can click on the ‘Devices’ tab to set yourself up for Twitter on your cell phone; you can get text messages of Twitter messages, and also send a broadcast from your phone. This can be very useful if you’re away from your office a lot (like much of us are) but you still want to be sending regular updates.

Another tab you want to go to right away is the ‘Notices’ tab. This is where you can choose how often Twitter contacts you. I would recommend disabling the New Follower Emails. Otherwise, every time someone follows you, you’ll get an email notifying you. Since your goal is to have followers in the thousands, that would be a lot of email cluttering up your inbox.

Personalizing Your Twitter Page

Finally, the ‘Design’ tab is where you can mess around with your color scheme. You can choose from their pre-created theme colors or templates, or upload your own customized Twitter page. If you’ve already got an established website, this is a great opportunity to make sure that your Twitter page reflects the same design sensibilities. With http://twitter.com/johncow I created a custom background that matches the JohnCow blog, but also adds a personal touch to it.

Remember, Twitter is a social platform and you want your followers to feel like they know you, so create something that gives them a little peek inside. As you can see from my background, I added a picture of a trip to Niagara Falls and a Christmas picture from Disney World. I also however, put the urls to the different businesses i run and put a little slogan on the top of the page.

A fantastic resource for creating a free and professional looking background is http://freetwitterdesigner.com/ but there are also paid services out there as well. I do not have any recommendations for paid services, as with a service like Free Twitter Designer I see no reason to pay for one… but if you want to, then just search Google and I am sure you will find a few

Another extremely important thing to keep in mind is that your profile bio needs to be short and to the point but you will want to have keywords in there that people will search for when looking for other people to follow. Do not put long tail terms in there, keep them top level and make your profile flow.

Also remember that in your profile you will want to add the URL of your main site, this is linked to from your Twitter page and will be visited by people checking out your profile… and YES people will look at your profile. I was confused a while ago as to why people were direct messaging me in Twitter and asking me for personal mentoring, then I realized it was because I had mentioned in my profile that I am a “Mentor”… so yes people do read your profile

And there you have it – everything you need to know to get set up on Twitter. They really make it as easy as possible. Next, the harder part (well not really hard but harder ) – how to post Tweets and start to build your following.

If you want to check out the other lessons in my “Twitter Marketing Training” series, then go here… http://www.johncow.com/twitter-marketing-for-your-business-free-blog-series/

Checklist

Create a list of potential user names, keeping in mind your goal (branding, name recognition or keyword ranking)
Make variations of each potential username
Got to https://twitter.com/signup and create you account
Fill out your profile (image, bio, etc) in full
Create a custom background

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What is Twitter and How Does It Work?

Jason Katzenback — Fri, 01 May 2009 18:00:54 +0000

Here it is, the first in my training series for Twitter. This post will be covering the basics of what Twitter is and how it works, so if you’re already up and running with Twitter, bear with me while I get everybody else up to speed. We’ve got 10 more parts to go, and trust me, we’ll be getting into some more complicated things. But in order to get set up right, you’ve got to start at the beginning. And who knows, even if you’ve been using Twitter for a while, you still might learn something!

What Is Twitter?

Twitter is an extremely fast growing social media network with currently over 1 million members but this is expected to explode! All communications are limited to 140 characters, with no special coding or labeling, although you can use links (but the links are changed into smaller redirect links if they are too long).

Twitter describes themselves as a service for friends, family and coworkers to stay connected through the exchange of quick frequent answers to the same question – what are you doing?

In countries all around the world, people follow the sources most relevant to them and access information via Twitter as it happens—from breaking world news to updates from friends.

How Twitter Works

Twitter offers a simple way for people to connect. Twitter asks one question… “What are you doing?”

Answers must be under 140 characters in length and can be sent via mobile texting, instant message, or the web.

Twitter’s core technology is a device agnostic message routing system with rudimentary social networking features. They accept messages from SMS, web, mobile web, instant message, or from third party API projects.

Twitter’s engineering team works with an open-source web application framework called Ruby on Rails. The web site and user interface were designed using Omnigraffle and Photoshop. They like to make frequent changes to the interface, and Rails provides them with a skeleton code frameworks so they don’t have to re-do the whole site every time they add or change something like a sign in form or a picture upload feature. I realize that 90% of you do not care about this but now you know

Twitter has a very simple interface for interacting with other users – simply type your message in to a text box, and click to send it out. It then goes into Twitter’s database, is sent out to all that area following you, will appear on your own homepage, your profile and on any cross-platform third party application you might be using (I will get into much more details on this later).

The other place that it appears is on the public timeline, which has all the tweets that everybody is posting. This moves really fast – most of the posts that you will see have been posted in the last 5 seconds.

Although Twitter asks you what you’re doing, most users use it for something other than that. You can share interesting links (yours or otherwise) with other people. You can set it up for Twitter to send out an update every time you add a new post to your blog PLUS more.

How Twitter Can Work For Your Business

Twitter can put your business’s message in front of thousands of people, instantly. If you can harness this power, and use it effectively, Twitter can help you promote your brand and add depth to your online identity.
Whether or not you’re experienced in social marketing, Twitter gives you a simple, easy-to-use way of interacting with your audience. Even if you’ve already done some social marketing and been successful, Twitter can still help you expand your audience and grow your circle of influence.

One thing to always keep in mind when using Twitter, however is this: this is a social tool, not an advertising outlet. You can’t just put messages out there that are just hard sells and expect people to keep following you. You need to put some time and effort into growing your community, interact with your followers (not selling things) and follow other people, and establish your credibility within Twitter before you start promoting yourself.

If you do it right, you can use your Twitter messages to direct your followers to check out your products, blogs, affiliate programs, or anything else that you want to promote. You can use Twitter to both promote things to your current contacts, as well as attract new business.

The best thing about twitter (in my opinion anyway) is they are much more open to developers creating third party applications (FaceBook recently changed to be more like Twitter)… the great thing about this is there are loads of tools that take 90% of the repetitive daily work out of using Twitter. This does not mean you can set and forget… that does not work with social sites… but you can do a lot of things automatically that are highly effective but time intensive.

A few of my absolute favorite 3rd Party Twitter Tools (I will be talking about these over the next couple weeks) are…

http://untweeps.com/: Unfollow followers who have abandoned their twitter account
http://dossy.org/twitter/karma/: Mass unfollow those who do not follow you
http://www.twellow.com/: Best twitter directory
http://twitterfeed.com/: Free service for auto posting to your twitter account
http://www.tweetlater.com/: Great service for managing automated direct messages, auto following and more
http://budurl.com/ Paid URL shortener that has excellent tracking
http://easytweets.com/ Paid service that replaces twitterfeed, automatically finds loads of people to follow and integrates with Google Analytics

Over the next couple weeks, I will be getting into much more depth of actually setting up and marketing using Twitter but the purpose of this post was to set the ground work of understanding, so you can start off on the right foot.

If you like this post… like the idea of this series… or just like me, PLEASE comment below, Click Here to retweet this messge and share it with others