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Twitter - What is twitter, and how can I use Twitter as a business tool?

Written by: Gary Reichel

Article Overview: Learn how to use Twitter as a business tool boosting your brand while allowing you to keep an eye on the competition.

Twitter - What is twitter, and how can I use Twitter as a business tool?

Twitter - What is twitter, and how can I use Twitter as a business tool?

Twitter is a micro blog that is used to send short posts to friends and followers. The short posts are called tweets and they can be no more than 140 characters long. To begin using Twitter as a business tool, you need to understand the difference between a Twitter "friend" and a "follower" and how information is shared.

The power of Twitter is the freshness of information that is generated by friends and followers. The core of Twitter revolves around your friends and followers, because it is by these people you will be able to develop your brand. Furthermore, it is by this flow of information that you will be able to keep an eye on the competition, staying current on the latest news and information in a niche.

First, let me further explain what a follower is and how you can use a follower to promote your brand. Basically, followers might be colleagues, friends or people interested in a niche. Since followers receive your tweets, they will be receiving the information and news you want to share. So to enforce your brand, your tweet might include a link to an article you wrote, or a blog post your created.

Next, you can also become a follower of someone you find interesting. This means you can receive tweets from perspective employers, colleagues and other people you find interesting. Using Twitter in this was may provide the latest news and information about a new job opportunity, or give you the latest news about events in a niche; thus, allowing you to keep an eye on the competition.

Beyond being a follower, or being followed, are your friends. Friends are created in in two ways. Either you add a follower as a friend, or someone you are following chooses you as a friend. Either way, the result is you both are sharing tweets. This mutual exchange is a great way to set up quasi communities that revolve around a niche.

Twitter is more than a micro blog, it is a tool. It can provide a branding platform that allows others an opportunity to learn what you find important and interesting. Twitter is also a good way to stay current on news and information pertaining to your niche. The bottom line is Twitter is a tool that shares fresh information among niches that can be used in both personally and professionally.

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Article Tags: blog, business tool, colleagues, follower, followers, freshness, job opportunity, mutual exchange, new job, niche, perspective employers, tweet, twitter, two ways



Related Forum Posts
Re: Twitter vs Facebook - [quote="KH_Global":3e2sd4ss]Twitter: Twitter is a good for traffic building. But how do we build the traffic using twitter. I am still at novice to use twitter. So, have not seen any perfect step to this. I also heard about twitter can be monetized. But how? Could anyone share about this? [/quote:3e2sd4ss] First, imho, if you focus on 'monetizing Twitter', you are going for the wrong goal. Twitter is a relationship-building tool (and so is Facebook for that matter). If you try to sell things, or put ads in your Twitter stream, you will generally turn people off. Build relationships first, and those relationships will lead to potential clients and lucrative off-Twitter joint ventures. To build traffic using Twitter: Provide useful, valuable information on your website, and then post about that info on Twitter. The easiest way is to have a blog where you solve some problem that people are looking for solutions to. Then you tweet your posts and this drives traffic to your website. However it's also important to provide comprehensive value by tweeting to other sources of the kind of info your followers will be looking for. If you provide value, folks will follow you, they'll read your tweets, and they'll 'follow' you to your site eventually.
Re: Is Anyone Using Tweetdeck? - Hi Ros Welcome back. Tweetdeck sounds like a great tool to use for Twitter. I have been too busy lately to spend much time on Twitter, but with a tool like this you can do what you need to do and limit the time you spend on Twitter as well. Will look into it, thanks. MichelleJ
Re: Twitter vs Facebook - I use Facebook pages for Business and rarely ever use Twitter. I hace lost count of the no. of Hotels that I have visited, regarding their marketing campaigns, that may have 5k Facebook Fans and only 100 followers on Twitter. It is a lot more difficult to engage with people on Twitter and thus harder to gain traction. If you are a business like Nike, then Twitter is great, but if you are an SME, then focus on Facebook or LinkedIn (if you are providing a professional service.) You can always have your Facebook feed directly in to Twitter, so you can have a presence on both, but do the work on one. Also check out ping.fm for managing campaigns - it is a free tool, and a great time saver.
Re: Twitter vs Facebook - Twitter: Twitter is a good for traffic building. But how do we build the traffic using twitter. I am still at novice to use twitter. So, have not seen any perfect step to this. I also heard about twitter can be monetized. But how? Could anyone share about this? Facebook: I created fanpage and added more links and inviting people to become a fan of my or my business. Is there anything which can be done without paid facebook ads? What creative ways can we do beyond joining groups, leaving comments on somebody's wall, starting discussion on topics? Would like to hear your views on this. Thanks, Robert
Re: Is any one making money with twitter here? - This is a great thread. I disagree with the thought that twitter is at it's peak, or close to it. I do agree however that Twitter is beginning to seem saturated with ads, bots and all sorts of unwanted spam. You as an entrepreneur have to rise above this and stand out from the crowd. I think that these ad services are a bad idea, they make your twitter profile look like a spam bot, full of ads nobody wants to see. I would advise that you shy away from offers like these if you want to maintain the integrity of your profile. Twitter is a means of building your personal brand, when you build your brand people begin to trust you and when people trust you they will buy from you but you will dissolve that trust if you start posting ads all over the place. Every single entrepreneur on my mastermind team uses twitter in conjunction with other free and paid methods. Twitter does make up the MAJORITY of my free traffic and offers extremely targeted leads that do generate cash flow for me. I will post some advanced twitter lessons on my blog in the near future. Dallas.


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