Day 16. Social Media Basics: Twitter.

I have a Twitter account and I have almost 400 followers, but to tell the truth I did not understand how it works. I did some research (this is my favorite activity for the last couple of weeks) and came to the conclusion: there are several reasons people join Twitter. Some people use it only to communicate with friends and family to send updates where they are and what they do. Others treat Twitter as a micro-blog, they write several posts a day about everything. And the third group uses Twitter for business.

If you are using Twitter for business, do not go through your product list and tweet product after product – this is the quickest way to get a mass number of “unfollowers”. The best way to attract and maintain followers is to share content that others find interesting. Nothing is new here and I think the same rules could be applied to pretty much any social media.

I think my focus is supposed to be on sharing information in a variety of ways (we spoke about this in a previous post about Facebook): post a link to interesting news, ask questions to learn what your followers are interested in, follow other Twitter feeds and engage in conversations with people I’m trailing. Also I want to use Twitter frequently. Practice makes perfect, right? The only way to get comfortable using this new technology is to dive in and use it.

I want to drive traffic to my site and I find that I can use Twitter as a marketing tool to build name recognition. It’s not even necessary to have a long list of followers to have success – lately I really got more users who re-twit me. Unfortunately, I cannot find a report that show user coming from twitter to my Etsy shop, but I think if people re-twit my messages, my name will show up more often and it can help to.

I never thought about it but Twitter can be used for research. You can write keywords into Twitter’s search function to find information on any topic you’re researching and see what others are saying about it. Whatever your business or interest, look for what people are saying about it on Twitter by using a hash mark (#) before the search term. For the same reason, when you tweet something do not forget to add tags with #.

One more note about Twitter. Remember, that everything you twit is publicly available and anyone who read your twit will be able to come to your page.

Now I #understand Twitter much better. And I #hope you too.

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