Using Twitter for Your Business

Twitter is one of the more recent tools to come out and the public is just getting started with it. It’s more than a chat program, but on first glance it doesn’t seem like it’s going to help you do anything at all.

Go to twitter.com and join, it’s a free account.

Then go to Tweetdeck.com and download their free software. Tweetdeck is a program that helps make twitter a lot more GUI (goo-ey) (in tech language this means graphical user interface – or colorful and fun to look at and play with).

Install tweetdeck and sign into your twitter.com account through Tweetdeck.

You’ll see three columns that pop up -

All Friends, Replies, and Direct Messages.

• All friends is everyone that is following you.
• Replies are those that wrote to you directly and you can write back to directly.
• Direct Messages are those that sent you a private, direct message.

You’ll need to add some friends that you follow. Eventually people will “follow” you too.

When they follow you and send messages they’ll be shown in your Tweetdeck. When you send messages (tweet) you can do that by clicking the upper left most icon that says “Tweet”. A box will open up where you type your tweets.

Anyway – so that’s basically how it works and you’ll have to play with it quite a bit to familiarize yourself with everything you can do in the Tweetdeck interface…

Using Tweetdeck for business is rather easy.

Go to the 7th icon from the top left called “Twitter Search” and click it.

It will open a pop-up that allows you to search the twittersphere for all chats involving your keyword. Type Canon gl2 and you’ll probably see some results. This search is saved and becomes a new column in your Tweetdeck. It will be updated every so often (changeable in the settings icon in upper right) and you’ll see all the tweets related to whatever you want. Search on business products or services you sell and bam – you’ve got instant people to contact about your product or service. Add them to your friend list and send them a reply that is not pushy at all – just let them know you have some of whatever they were looking for. Maybe don’t contact them again if they don’t reply as it would be rude and Tweeters are quite considerate so far – lets not hasten it’s demise with spam.

If you have any questions about using Twitter for your business we have a training module you can purchase at our partner site that will teach you everything you need to know about Twitter for your business and personal pleasure.

Best Regards,

Dean Harrington, Owner