Social Media Marketing for the Small Business: Series 2 of 8

Welcome back for the 2^nd Part of our 8 part Social Media series.  In this part we’ll be taking a look at one of the most powerful Social Media platforms on the planet, Twitter.  This micro-blogging website has become enormously influential and is beloved around the world. In fact, it was profiled in Business Week and they agreed that it’s a powerful way to promote just about any type of business that you can think of!  Let’s take a look at how to use it to your best advantage.

The first thing you need to do to if you want to get started on Twitter’s powerful platform is to sign up and reserve the name that you want on your account. You may ‘tweet’ (send messages) using your own name but you want that all-important company name on your webpage no matter what you do, and you also want to make sure that none of your competitors get the name before you do. There’s a simple guide on Twitter that you can use to get things started.

Spending half an hour surfing various Twitter pages and familiarizing yourself with what’s available on their site is a great idea, and you should of course search for whatever it is that your company does or produces. For example, if you’re a florist searching ‘flowers’ or ‘local florist’ should give you an idea of who’s out there and what they’re doing on Twitter.

You can also search for your business on Twitter.  Who knows, people may already be talking about you! Once you’ve familiarized yourself with what Twitter can do it’s time to step it up a notch and really get things going for your business.

Using a few of the advance Twitter tools that are out there is the best way to start using Twitter to funnel revenue towards your biz. There are many mobile clients that Twitter has like Tweetie, TweetDeck and Seesmic that will give you the flexibility and control that you need to create your own Twitter ‘voice’ and develop a strategy to increase awareness of your brand.

Pre-defining searches to monitor keywords, grouping people to minimize noise and distractions and defining custom searches (use Twitterfall) will help you to focus in on trending topics so that you can take advantage of them and get noticed.

Use these tips and, once your Twitter page is up and running, come on back for Part 3 where we’ll talk about the power of Company Blogs. Good luck tweeting!