01. Enter Your Name!
People underestimate the importance of a well constructed username. There are a few key decisions to make when choosing your handle, though. Your Twitter handle can only contain 14 characters, somewhat restrictive when compared to other platforms. Still, there is plenty of room here to get the message across. Suppose, for example, that your business name is Ocean's Crest Graphics.
On Twitter, chances are the name @OceansCrest is taken. You can still get the message across and distinguish yourself from the other with a handle like @OceansCrestGFX. This is just within the 14 character limit, and conveys your brand name in shorthand (something you'll find to be the norm on Twitter).
If you'd like to build a professional profile to use in conjunction with your brand profile (and I'd highly suggest doing so), you might include your name or title in your handle. If your name is Markus and you're the CEO of Ocean's Crest Graphics Inc, you might use @OcnCrestMarkus, or @OceansCrestCEO.
This account will be useful for interacting on a more personal level with your customers, addressing any questions you'd rather not answer on the main profile, or even networking with other business owners and operators. Even better if you bring your coworkers onboard with similar names and goals, like @OcnCrestDavid or @OcnCrestAmyCFO.
This will all help customers recognize and interact with your company as well as presenting multiple avenues for promotion and marketing. Be sure to communicate your intention and guidelines clearly to any employees using officially sanctioned handles however, as a severe misstep by any of them could reflect negatively on your organization as a whole.
Twitter: 25 Powerful Twitter Marketing Tips and Tricks for Small Business Description:
Maybe you just don’t know how to get started on Twitter, or what to do once you have. I’ve put this book together to give you some actionable, powerful tips to make the most out of marketing and selling on Twitter. I’m going to show you how to build a great profile, connect with your customers, participate in the community, find opportunities to branch out, and network effectively.
In the first chapter, “Build Your Profile”, I’ll be teaching you about what it takes to make a proper Twitter profile, and giving you some examples that I consider to be very well done. Every facet of building a profile from choosing your avatar to setting backgrounds and colors will be covered here, as well as techniques to make a proper introduction.
In Chapter 2, “Link Up!”, you’ll learn about connecting various services, maximizing your exposure. Methods for (sanely) working around the 140 character limit will be discussed, along with tips to leverage pre-existing connections. I’ll also give you some quick and easy tips about tweet construction to lead customers to your product pages, and introduce the concept of “retweeting”– something that seems simple, but can be an extraordinarily powerful tool.
Chapter 3, “Find Your Peers”, might be the most important chapter in this book for a business owner just starting out. Inside, I lay out the concrete, proven process to finding and keeping connections with both your fellow business owners and your customers. I’ll be covering the unique ways that Twitter enables businesses to interact with their customers, as well as cross-company promotion opportunities.
The fourth chapter is just as important in my opinion, though. “Meaningful Interaction” is about exactly what it seems to be– interacting with Twitter users in a relevant, reasonable, and exciting way. I’ll go more in-depth about the various functions of the platform, including the retweet, @, and direct message. I’ll also be talking about the importance of tone on Twitter, and how to avoid nasty pitfalls that could damage your brand and thereby your chances at success.
The points contained in Chapter 5, “Market Effectively”, are a little more broad than those in other chapters (with one exception). I’ll be talking a little more generally about what makes a good marketing strategy, and how those lessons can be applied on Twitter specifically. The one Twitter-exclusive point deals with promoting your tweets, but many platforms have an equivalent function.
