Key areas we will cover in chapter 4:

• ✓ setting up your Twitter account
• ✓ following and being followed
• ✓ tweeting
• ✓ listening out for your brand
• ✓ using Twitter tools
• ✓ setting up your listening post.

People ask me all the time, ‘Tell me about Twitter. I don’t see how it’s even of interest to people — who wants to know what I had for breakfast?’ On the surface, you can be forgiven for thinking that, but it can really be a very powerful tool for networking, researching, publishing, icebreaking and listening, so it has many uses. You just need to understand how it works and how to use some of the many tools that are available to you. In this chapter we will look at some of these tools and share some stories about how other companies and individuals have found success with Twitter.

Quick facts on Twitter

Here are some interesting Twitter facts:

• It’s a quick and easy way to microblog.
• Five hundred million tweets are sent every day.
• It has over 300 million monthly active users.
• You can tweet on the run.
• It’s a great icebreaker for networking.
• You can get breaking news as it happens.
• Eighty per cent of monthly active users access Twitter by a mobile device.

What is Twitter?

Twitter was born in 2006 and is based in San Francisco. Tweets can be instantly translated from English to many other languages, so people all over the world can use Twitter easily — all you need is an internet connection and a device such as a computer or smartphone. Twitter asks the question, ‘What’s happening?’ and was originally intended for college kids to keep in touch in a similar way to Facebook, but using only 140 characters — short and snappy. Others quickly saw the benefits of using this simple system to chat with people around the world, and the phenomenon grew, with many millions of people actively ‘tweeting’ every day.

Businesses then saw the advantages of using such a platform to shout about their products and services. As time progressed and more and more people started tweeting, it became apparent that it could also be used as a listening tool. Individuals saw Twitter as a way to gripe about products or services from large and small brands, a no-holds-barred, out-in-the-open-air conversation. Businesses quickly realised that they needed to do something to keep any bad press about themselves under control and quickly sort out any issues as they came to light. Likewise, businesses wanted to jump in and listen to all of the positive things that people were saying about their brand and thank them for being cheerleaders. There is also the conversation that is neither positive nor negative, where someone is simply asking a question, such as, ‘Who has the better deal, Vodafone or Telstra?’ Now if you are either of those companies, you are naturally going to want to engage with that possible customer and convert them to your brand if they are in the market, so Twitter can be used for intelligence too.

Setting up your account

The process is very straightforward: go to www.twitter.com and register, but give some thought to your username. There are some very odd usernames out there and some are very obviously ‘get rich quick’ schemes or multilevel marketing programs, so don’t turn people off with a dumb name. Use either your own name or a version of it if someone else has already taken it, or something associated with your company if it is to be a company account. That might simply be the company name, but as you don’t have too many characters to play with, you may need to abbreviate it. Some companies have different accounts for different parts of their business, such as @vodafone_AU and @vodafoneAU_help. They are both part of the same company but have a different voice for the different business aspects they cover. The same goes for Hilton Hotels: they have @HiltonHotels and @HiltonHelp, making for a quick response from a designated Twitter account.

Home page

This is where you can see how many followers you have, how many you are following yourself, how many tweets you have sent, any tweets you have saved to your favourites, and a whole bunch of other information. It is also where you will see tweets coming in from others you are following so that you can respond if you want to. You now also have the option of following people that Twitter has suggested: it will suggest people to follow who are similar to the person’s profile you are viewing. I must admit, most of the suggested ‘who to follow’ people have been of interest to me, so I find it’s a good tool on Twitter’s part.

‘Trends’ is something to keep an eye on also as it shows the hot conversation threads that are going on right now. When someone famous dies, or there has been a terrorist attack, or other big news stories break, the information is soon out on the Twitter waves for everyone to see and follow. Look for the hashtags within trends and follow the story, or contribute your own with the same tag. In case you’re wondering what a hashtag is, it’s simply a few letters with the # sign in front of them and it allows anyone to click the tag and follow what others are saying about a given topic, whether you follow each other or not. If you click the tag because of a common interest, such as #cycling, it’s also a great way to find others with the same interests and connect. Anyone can create a tag and although Twitter pretty much invented hashtags, you’ll see them across many social sites now.

Profile page

From your profile page you can customise the look and feel of your Twitter page, and add your photo and a bit about yourself. There is also space to put a link back to your website or use it to drive traffic back to your Facebook business page.

If you are an individual setting up your own account, remember your own personal brand is just as important as if you were representing Coca-Cola, so take care. I suggest you have a slightly more relaxed bio than on, say, your LinkedIn page, but still keep it professional. Mine currently includes my day job but also ‘writer, runner and sometimes cyclist’, and I have a link to my website.

This captures the professional headline that is on all of my branding, with a little extra about my pastimes, which is important when it comes to networking. People do read these profiles, so be sure that what you write is what you are happy to be seen as. I saw one once that read reasonably professionally but then had ‘dirty salsa dancer’ at the end. That turned my interest off.

So, should you use your company logo or your own picture? Well, people do like to know who they are actually talking to and a logo can come across as a bit too corporate so you have a couple of choices.

• Use your own photo with the company-name account.
• Use the logo but be sure to make your name known on the profile page so people can talk to you properly. I hate it when I view a profile of someone and there is only the company name but no mention of who the person behind it is. How can you communicate with an anonymous person? It gives me an impression of an impersonal company from the start.

When it comes to filling in your location, it’s a good idea to put the city as well as the country so that when someone is searching for a business in your city, you come up in the search results.

Finding followers and who to follow

Now that you have built your Twitter page and added some information to it by way of a photo and a short bio, you are ready to find some interesting people to follow and get some followers back. By the general rule of reciprocity, many people you follow will follow you back. Start off by seeing who you know from your address book in the ‘find friends’ link, which you can find on your home page just under ‘who to follow’. That will bring up a search box so you can simply type in either their Twitter username, if you know it, or their full name. If they are listed on Twitter, it should pop up for you and you just need to make your choice and click on the ‘follow’ button. You can also export and upload your contacts from Gmail and Outlook and then connect.

What Twitter itself doesn’t give you is a real way to search a directory for new people to follow. But you can click on ‘who to follow’ and browse by interests or find friends, and a list will be created for you; then just choose who to follow. For example, if you like writing and want to follow other writers, put ‘writing’ in the search box and see who pops up. If you want even more of a directory to choose from — say categories — take a look at www.twellow.com, which is almost a Twitter directory as it covers just about everyone you could possibly want to follow. You should register your own details with the site (normally just your Twitter username and password) and then fill out a few details about who and where you are so that others can find you. Then get searching.

Search for businesses in your area, your prospects, clients and people of interest to you and add them in. As I said earlier, most people will automatically follow you back — unless you look like a possible spam account.

Spam and abuse

You will notice your Twitter followers drop off by quite a chunk occasionally as Twitter culls the spam accounts out, so don’t be too concerned if you see yours take a nosedive one day. Twitter is pretty good at keeping the rubbish down. It is probably worth mentioning at this stage that it is not wise to become a spam account yourself, as your life on Twitter will be short. By spam account, I mean setting up your account to target people with the sole purpose of pushing your product or service continually. You may find your account deactivated.

Here are a few activities that may draw some attention to you and should be avoided:

• aggressive following in large numbers
• creating large numbers of accounts
• sending large numbers of @replies
• having a very small number of followers compared with the number you are following
• attempting to buy followers
• using pornography anywhere.

These are just a few; a full list of the dos and don’ts can be found on Twitter under ‘help’.

Get tweeting

The next step is to decide what you want to get out of Twitter and work on a plan to get you there. Whatever you are trying to achieve, there are some basic principles that remain the same:

• Add value — don’t sell. Nobody likes to be sold to, so gain people’s trust and respect by sending out interesting article links about your field of expertise. Don’t send these out from your own website every time; vary them from other respectable sites too. I suggest two in 10 should be from your own business sites.
• Retweet (RT). Retweeting or sharing items that you have found interesting that someone else has posted says two things: that you found the tweet interesting (which the originator will be pleased to hear) and that it is likely to be interesting to your followers. Retweeting is the ultimate compliment on Twitter and great exposure for the originator. Can you imagine if someone in your network RT’d your tweet and on it went? Where would your post end up? That is the exponential effect of Twitter.
• Engage. Let’s say you would like to meet the CEO of a particular company but at this stage he doesn’t even know you exist. Apart from calling him on the phone or calling in at his place of work, how else are you going to get in touch with him? See if he is on Twitter with the search function, add him to a list so that you don’t miss his tweets, and when you see a tweet from him that you can engage with, say something (more on lists later in this chapter). Now it doesn’t need to be earth shattering or thought provoking, just the start of building up a rapport. If he has just tweeted that he is walking his Doberman to the park to watch his young son play in a soccer tournament, you might ask about his dog as you have a Doberman too, or wish the boy good luck, saying it was your son’s tournament last weekend. The CEO will more than likely reply with thanks at the very least, and now he knows you exist. Don’t then blow it by jumping in feet first! Court him with chitchat and interesting articles about his industry. It might take a little time so don’t rush into it and ruin what you’ve started. When the time is right, suggest a meeting or coffee and you will feel like you already know a little about each other. It makes the call a warm one rather than a cold one.
• Grow. You need to actively grow your followers so that you can create a tribe of people who see you as an expert in your field, and add value to their world. When you do then publish something from your own business, more people will have the opportunity to see it, which is more exposure for you. Think back to the exponential effect of Twitter and where your post could possibly end up.
• Listen. Use Twitter to listen to what people are saying about you or your brand.

Communicating on Twitter

There are two ways to communicate on Twitter: @replies and direct messages (DM). @replies are directed to a particular person or account and they view their messages via their notifications tab — these are public to anyone searching. Direct messages are private, with only the two parties being able to see the message content, just like email.

Back to @replies: if you want everyone to be able to see it rather than just the person you are replying to, put some text before the @ sign, even if it’s just a symbol. For example, ‘Have a lovely weekend @richardbranson’ will mean that Richard will see it and so will all your other followers. A reply of just ‘@richardbranson have a lovely weekend’ will only be seen by him (or probably more likely his social media team). If you get an @reply yourself, don’t forget to reply to it. It’s no different from a text or email: it’s someone communicating with you so it warrants a response.

If you are using an application such as Hootsuite to sort your tweets rather than Twitter itself, you will see direct messages in one column and mentions (@replies) in another when you set it up, so you shouldn’t miss any. Direct messages will also filter through into your ordinary email inbox as a duplicate unless you turn them off in your Twitter settings.

Lists

Lists are a great way to file the people you are following so that you can keep track of important tweets coming in without them getting lost in the flow of things. When you start getting into the thousands of followers, it is impossible to see and respond to them all. You can create lists for anything you want to filter out, such as clients, prospects, competition, motivational, educational and so on. This means that once you have added someone to a list you created, their tweets will filter through to that list for you to see easily and respond to if you wish. I find this particularly helpful for monitoring business prospects and my current clients. Think of a list as a filing cabinet or folder.

Advanced and auto following tools

As your account grows, it can become a little tedious clicking on each automated message from Twitter telling you that you have a new follower and deciding whether or not to follow them and action the message, so there are tools that will do this automatically for you. That way, you can still see the emails sent to you by Twitter alerting you to new followers, but you don’t need to actually do anything with them. Incidentally, you can turn these email alerts off in your Twitter settings too, if you wish, but I like to be nosey and monitor them. The tool for automating your followers is www.socialoomph.com, and you can do a whole heap of other things there too to automate Twitter. There is even the option to send an auto response message to someone when they follow you. I used to use it, but I think it looks a little like spam, and it comes across as auto-generated no matter how you write the reply, which, of, course it is. Your choice — the option is there.

Advanced search

Go to www.twitter.com/search-advanced, and you can look for a whole bunch of variables, such as location, conversations between certain people and dates of conversations past. This is particularly handy if you are, say, a catering company and you are looking for people planning events who are in need of caterers in a certain city. There are many things you could search for and this is a great and easy-to-use tool to add to your toolbox. Give it a go and see what you can find out that is useful to your business.

Making posting easy

There are many applications that run with Twitter, and they make it so simple to keep tabs on things all on one screen. There are many others that do a similar job, but www.hootsuite.com, www.buffer.com and www.tweetdeck.com are my favourites. So what makes them special? You can:

• view all of your incoming tweets in one column
• see your @replies on the same page
• see your direct messages on the same page
• update your personal or business Facebook page from here
• update your LinkedIn status update, company page and groups from here
• add several accounts you may be managing, all on one screen
• set up search result columns so you don’t miss tweets about certain topics or people
• schedule posts to be delivered at a later date.

Depending on which one you opt for, you can allow multiple users to update multiple channels all at the same time, which is useful for time management as well as security. The sites have a free or paid version and each has its own cool extras, so look at them all before you decide. Personally, I use Hootsuite — I like its simplicity and it runs many accounts at the same time for me in one place. It’s also one of the few that works with Instagram, though it’s not quite seamless yet. The main thing I use Hootsuite for is to schedule my posts to be delivered later in the day/week/month, which is a great productivity tool and means that when I am away from my desk things are still filtering out to my followers, and pages on other platforms are being updated. Hootsuite has a great help function to get you started, with many videos to learn from. If you decide to upgrade to the paid version, which is well worth the few $$ per month, there are plenty of analytics to look at. Use the analytics to monitor what works for you — then do more of what’s working for you and drop what isn’t working.

Listen out for your brand

As people now take to online channels to talk about anything and everything, have you thought about what they may be saying about you or your brand? Twitter is a great tool for listening even if you don’t use it for tweeting much. If someone has something negative to say about you or your brand, wouldn’t you like to know about it so you can respond? Following are a couple of examples of what I mean.

Donald Trump has been active on Twitter for a long time, and chose it as his soapbox of choice during the campaign to become president of the United States. He’s outspoken, challenging and vocal in his approach, getting into public debates with people from all walks of life. Becoming president has not stopped him. In one tweet, he slammed Nordstrom, where his daughter Ivanka’s clothing range was sold, after they decided not to continue selling the range. Nordstrom stock took a dip immediately after the tweet but then bounced back shortly after. Talk about influence. Now that could be the Trump name or the fact that a tweet slamming Nordstrom went viral and shareholders reacted. Influential people are even more influential when you add in a digital soapbox.

Listening online — setting up alerts

So what sort of things should you be listening for and where should you be listening? Twitter is a great place to start, as well as Socialmention, Hootsuite and Google Alerts, which are alerts that are delivered to your inbox about a given keyword such as your company name (these are explained further down). I have set up alerts for Linda Coles, Blue Banana, Blue Bananas, Bluebanana20 and a few others. As most of my social media usernames are bluebanana20, I watch out for both because people often simply refer to me as Blue Banana, and I don’t want to miss what they are saying. The problem with this is that I get everything to do with Blue Banana the clothing and body-piercing company. Some of those piercing tweets make my eyes water!

It is an easy job to monitor once you have the systems in place and it only takes me a few seconds a day to filter through the Blue Banana tweets as I’ve learned to recognise who is who. Set up a column or stream with Hootsuite for the various words or terms you want to listen out for and any tweets containing those words will populate the stream.

You can also listen to what your competitors are saying, even without them knowing that you are listening in, which may be useful in your industry. I used to do this, but found I was spending time worrying about what they were up to rather than concentrating on my own business. If you want to follow someone in your industry, follow someone you admire and can learn from as this is far more positive and probably more worthwhile.

Google Alert

To set a Google Alert, set up a Google account, if you don’t have one already, and click on ‘alerts’ or go to www.google.com/alerts. Depending on how often you want to be informed, you can set the email notifications to ‘as it happens’, ‘daily’ or ‘weekly’, so you can control the number of emails coming in.

If you are watching a search term rather than a word, you will need to put speech marks (“ ”) around the term. So, for example, if I want to watch out for Blue Banana, I will need to enter “Blue Banana”, otherwise I will get alerts with just blue or just banana in them, which is a bit of a waste of time and far too labour-intensive. You can set up as many alerts as you wish and see which ones are of value to you.

Hootsuite

With Twitter, there are a few ways to monitor tweets, but I find that using Hootsuite and setting up separate streams or columns for each search term is enough. That way, the tweet is quickly filtered out from the main traffic stream and is visibly sitting there in its own column waiting for me to notice it. If you download Hootsuite to your smartphone, you can see the tweets coming through while you are on the move. Again, see which terms you need to monitor as you may find too many a bit of a headache.

The columns can also be used for listening to specific people within your industry or to those you are interested in and want to snoop on.

I also have columns and alerts set up for areas that I want to respond to such as ‘looking for a speaker’ or ‘social media webinar’, so I can respond to someone’s request quickly. You might do the same for your business. If you are a florist, you might look out for ‘florist in Sydney’. Think about what someone tweeting about needing a florist would enter if they’re in Sydney — probably something like, ‘Can anyone recommend a florist in Sydney?’ That would then get picked up and filtered into your column for you to see and pounce on. This is a simple way to use tweets to generate a little extra business.

Twitter’s advanced search facility

www.twitter.com/search-advanced gives you the same functionality as Hootsuite, but you also have the ability to define the area. As Urgent Couriers found out, having a column set up for ‘need a courier’ meant that the filter would also pick up tweets from the other side of the world, which was not a lot of good to it. By using www.twitter.com/search-advanced, it could restrict it to within a 100-kilometre radius of Auckland. Much better for its business and it also cuts out the irrelevant tweets.

I very nearly missed out on working with a top-five company, but because I had various streams set up listening for me, I caught the conversation before it was too late.

Conclusion of chapter 4

Twitter can be used for many different business tasks as well as keeping up to date with your interests, but at least set it up as a listening post and check in regularly to see what, if anything, is being said about you or your brand.

Each day, spend five minutes in the morning posting relevant and interesting information, and revisit Twitter in the afternoon to see if you have any replies that need attention.

Your content plan will come in very handy when using Twitter so make sure you have filled in all of the boxes.