Twitter Tips to Help Small Business Owners.

Thank you to Mike Jones CENTUM Core Financial Inc for the information.

1. Twitter is first and foremost a place to connect, learn, and listen.
2. Define your goals if you have any (e.g. business promotion, socializing, etc).
3. If you’re confused about where to begin on Twitter, but are interested in learning, take a look at the previously done Twitip post that highlights key people for beginners to follow.
4. Twitter allows you to interact with individuals who you might not normally come into contact with. If you want to interact with a celebrity or a person with a huge following then send a simple @ message or comment on something they are doing. If you get a response you can then take it from there.
5. Don’t be offended if folks don’t follow you back. It’s not personal. (Even if it is, it doesn’t really matter.)
6. Use a photo of yourself or your business logo in you profile.
7. If you’re interested in connecting with someone you might want to try ReTweeting some of their messages before you introduce yourself.
8. It’s probably going to take a good 3 to 6 months to get a following.
9. Find out who the influencers are in your industry and see if they are on Twitter. If they are, follow them.
10. Always follow Jeff Pulver’s rule of giving 95% of the time and asking only 5% of the time.
11. Utilize a Twitter photo-sharing site like TwitPic or Yfrog to share cool photos from your typical business day, or while plying your craft, so that people get to know you. It helps to build social trust.
12. Use Twitter Search with keywords to find information and conversations that are relevant to your business. It’s also a good way to find out if anyone is talking about you or your company.
13. If you are not part of a particular conversation that concerns your area of business, but you would like to participate, approach with caution.
14. If you are sending DM’s to your followers with something related to your business, make sure to use your social capital wisely. Overwhelming folks with DM’s can result in a rapid loss of followers
15. Don’t Tweet anything that you would not want to see on the front page of a newspaper or wildly famous website.
16. Do interact and connect and don’t hesitate to @ message folks who have 10x or 100x the number of followers you have.
17. Employ sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, and Reddit to find, and share amongst your followers, interesting stories from your particular area of business.
18. Create connections don’t spam. You most likely would not just walk into a crowded venue where you don’t know anyone and say, “Hi my name is Bob and I replace window screens and have great prices.” This method does not work very well on Twitter. (Should be a given but you still see it every day!)
19. Twitter is only one area online where you can begin to build a distributed social media footprint for your business. Do NOT rely solely on Twitter as your social media business promotion tool.
20. It takes a long time to build up a following and develop trust, but it only takes one Tweet to alienate every one of your followers.