Using Twitter for Marketing: Getting to Know Twitter
I thought it might be useful to do a series on Twitter Basics – and just simply getting to know your Twitter page. If you don’t know how to use the basics how can you expect to use twitter for marketing your business, product or service? If you are a more advanced Twitter user you may want to peruse these posts because you may find something here you didn’t know – I sure did as I began to do the research to write these. 
There are also some tips and best practices on how to use these features to best build your twitter and marketing success (a couple of warnings of what to beware of as well…).
Highlighted in red you will see the “Home” section of Twitter. There are 5 separate items in this “Home” section, each of which is quite important.
The @yourtwittername section
This is how you know when someone is tweeting ‘AT’ (or @) you, and how you tweet at others. When you click on the @yourtwittername (in my case @paysoncooper) link you will see a page of all the tweets that have included your direct twitter user name. If someone writes your name without the ‘@’ sign or with letters before it with no spaces those tweets will not show up here (and you won’t know they were trying to tweet at you). If you want to direct a tweet at someone else, be sure to use the @theirtwittername with a space before the ‘@’ and after the last letter of their twitter name (except for punctuation). For example:
“Good morning @paysoncooper!” Is a tweet that will show up in on my @paysoncooper twitter page, and if you send it, I’ll know you are saying, “Good morning,” to me.
Direct Messages
A direct message is created by putting a “d” and a space and then the twitter users name, for example, ‘d paysoncooper’. You can also click on the ‘Direct Messages’ link, then go to the top of the page and select the name of the person you want to direct message from the drop down, then type your message and click ‘Send’. You can only direct message someone that is following you. This is a great way to send a specific message to someone, but be very careful not to spam people through a dm – they will unfollow you pretty quickly if you do. Also, be aware that when you receive a direct message that says something like, “you look funny in this picture,” or “somebody wrote something about you in this blog here,” with a link, it is likely a hacked tweet – meaning, the person who ‘sent’ the direct message didn’t actually send it – their twitter account was hacked and someone is trying to get you to click on the link, which might open your computer to a virus or your twitter account to being hacked as well.
Favorites
When you place your mouse over a tweet on your screen you will see a little star appear on the upper right side – you can click that star to save ‘favorite’ tweets. A great way to use this is if someone says something complimentary about you, your business, product or service you can ‘favorite’ the tweet and begin collecting ‘Twitter Testimonials”. There are a few other ‘special’ things you can do with this that I talk about in the Twitter Selling Secrets course – click if you want to know more.
Retweets
The Retweets link will take you to a page where you can view all of the tweets you have ‘re-tweeted’. There are a couple of different ways to ‘retweet’ something – one of which is to scroll over the tweet you want to retweet and click ‘Retweet’. Retweeting tweets that you read that are interesting, inspiring, funny or otherwise interesting to your followers as well is a great practice. The people that you retweet really appreciate it and your twitter followers might see something they are looking for, but otherwise might not have found. This is a great way to build interest from your followers so that you can use twitter for marketing more effectively.
Search
The search feature in twitter is great. You can search someone’s name, a topic of interest, the keyword phrases you are tracking and using in your business etc. You can also use it to search hash tags or “#” codes in twitter – which is something people use to follow conversation and contribute to a larger chunk of information. For example #musicmonday or #ff (also known as #followfriday) are two very commonly used tags. On Mondays people post information about music and use the tag #musicmonday to contribute to that broader conversation, to identify the purpose of the tweet and so that their tweet will show up when people search #musicmonday. People use #FF or #FollowFriday along with a one or more twitter names to indicate people they like following, encourage others to follow them etc.
Comments
2 Responses to “Using Twitter for Marketing: Getting to Know Twitter”
Got something to say?
Get the Twitter and Marketing Tidbits
Follow Twitter And Marketing
Want Twitter Sales?
Know any special uses for any of these twitter features? Comment on what’s above or share them here for everyone else to benefit.
Hi Payson,
Thanks this is informative and benificial, I didn’t know much about twitter, didn’t take the time to learn and was tweeting away blindly. In fact learning to use the web as I go along.
Thanks Payson.
Vera