The Smashing Business Blog

As online business owners, we're always thinking about how we can continually get our brand and our business name out in to that ether commonly as the Web. We follow all of the latest social networking trends online but most of the time we’re not sure how to use them properly and that’s ok because we’re entrepreneurs not online marketing gurus. We can see the importance but it takes a lot of time to invest in online marketing via social media. Doesn’t it?

Well that depends. If you want to be continuingly reminding people of products and offers that you’re selling on the hour, every hour of the day and night then yes, it’ll probably take up a lot of your time and you probably won’t be interested in reading on. But if you want to harness the power of some of these social media worlds then let’s carry on.

I’m going to look at one of the big one’s in the social media world; Twitter. Why? Because at smashingbusiness.co.uk (@smashbiz) we use it and we think it’s great. Twitter can be a really powerful tool, that used well, can really help to increase the interest in your brand and your online business.

Here are my 5 tips for getting the most out of Twitter.

1.       Join the Conversion

For me, this is one of the big things that people new to Twitter miss. Twitter is a conversation and as in any conversation there needs to be a dialogue. Conversations aren’t much fun or of much interest when only one person talks. If you see something on Twitter that’s of interest, whether you agree or disagree with it, then reply to it or retweet it. Join the conversation. Use Twitter as a discussion tool not just a soap box.

2.       Don’t be a spammer

Personally, as an active Twitter user, there’s nothing more annoying to me than someone repeatedly pushing out spam; we sell this, we sell that, we’re great buy from us. It’s so unbelievably annoying and I usually unfollow them straight away. If you’re using Twitter to simply sell you’re products then you’ve probably chosen the wrong medium in which to do so, to be honest.

You need to balance your need or want to sell yourself and your product with the need to engage with your followers. Granted they’d like to know about your deals or special offers but they’d also like to know about you and what you’re doing. @ebuyerdotcom are at this. They tweet about their deals and new products sure but they also tweet about their blog posts and especially their Cake and Cookie Fridays, where they offer up great recipes for tasty treats. Try to use some creativity with your Twitter Feed and have fun.

3.       Follow to be followed

I found this out to my own expense about 6 months ago when I’d gotten stuck on around 100 followers and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t work out why my numbers wouldn’t change, then a friend of my pointed out the problem. I was unable to attract people to follow me because I was only following a handful of people myself. People were having the courtesy to follow me but I didn’t have the courtesy to follow them back. If you’re a big, well known brand like Virgin or the BBC then you can attract 100,000’s followers without ever having to follow them back but if, like me, you’re a small fish in a very large pond you need to follow people to be followed.

4.       Using 3^rd Party Apps

There’s nothing more sapping to your productivity as a business owner than checking your Twitter profile every 5 minutes to see what your followers are up to. If you do that you’ll never get any real work done so you need to use applications that can better track your followers. There are quite a few, just check out these apps  and you’ll see what I mean. My personal favourite is TweetDeck. Its customable features are great. You can set up columns for many of your Twitter accounts as you want; business or personal. Personal on my TweetDeck I have a column of just my favourite people that I follow, my mentions, and my Facebook news Feed. I get notifications on my desktop when any of those update and can then view them when I have the time.

5.       Hold back the flood

There can be loads of excitement when you initially join a social network like Twitter but that enthusiasm can boil over if you don’t discipline yourself and you can find that you are posting updates every  5mins. If you’re flooding the public timeline with that much content then, yes you will get noticed, but will you get noticed for the right reasons? Most likely not. Most likely you be disregarded by the actual people you’re trying to communicate with. Rather than posting out everything you can think of, at any given moment, try to hold back and only post the real quality and your followers will appreciate you more.

Follow smashingbusiness at @smashbiz

Or me @benlumley6

In business, it's often important to consider some deep questions about where you're going and what you're trying to achieve. But that can get tiring from time to time, so it's nice to think about some fun topics instead.

For example, I routinely like to consider which came first, the chicken or the egg? I come up with a different answer every time, but the important thing is the reasoning behind it. Playing this with children is fun because it teaches them to come up with logic and reasoning rather than just guess.

Another one is the age old "If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it fall, does it really make a sound?" I think this one is just as bad as Schroedinger's cat, and just as loopy. But again, it's fun to consider it, isn't it?

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