Twitter 101 – A Business Guide

Posted on July 23, 2009 by Barbara

image credit koreinternet.comImagine being able to communicate with your customers at any hour of the day on your time or their time? If you have a business that cares about your customer service and their overall experience then there is no better platform than Twitter.

While there are many ways to interact with your customers on Twitter here are a few that I think are the most important.

Reputation Management

If you are a brand like Southwest Airlines or Starbucks you can monitor Twitter for your brand name. There are apps available for you to monitor this automatically, but for the newbie, all you have to do is go to search.twitter.com and type in your brand name.  There you can monitor what people are saying about you.  There is no better “secret shopper” than Twitter.  It is a new frontier when it comes to customer surveys. Continue reading →

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Twitter Spammers

Posted on July 22, 2009 by Barbara

As with all good things on the web, people want to make money from it.  On Twitter, usually people want to get you to click on a link that will either take you to their affiliate site (A site that earns them money if you buy something) or a porn site.

Rule of thumb is USE CAUTION.  If something sounds too good to be true, it IS.  Avoid conversations or following people that follow thousands and only have a few people following them.  If a user has lots of followers, chances are they are ok, but still be careful.  Know what you are clicking on if possible.  I know it’s hard with all the url shortening services out now, but try and click on things that come from people you know or reputable news sources.

Sometimes if you mention a word, let’s say you are talking about playing Go Fish with your 8 year old.  You may get a reply from someone called @fish_lover like this one:

fishlover

Weird right? Don’t reply back.  Block and/or report people like that.  They are responding to you automatically based on a keyword you typed in.

Here is another great blog post about Steps on Stopping Spammers on Twitter. This post talks about how you can block and report people.

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Why Do People Color Their Twitter Avatar?

Posted on July 1, 2009 by Barbara

Occasionally you will log in to Twitter and see a rainbow of color across the faces of all the people you follow.  The most common reason for this is they are uniting for a cause.  Solidarity is very popular on Twitter and people want to show support for things they believe in.

In October you may have seen or will see lots of ‘pink’ faces in support of Breast Cancer Awareness.  Most recently you may have noticed that Twitter has turned ‘green’.  This has been the color of choice to show support for the Iran Election controversy.

Want to have a colored avatar(picture)?  Check out this blog post with some instructions on how you can do that.

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Twitterverse

Posted on May 24, 2009 by Barbara

image credit bigpicture.typepad.com

The Twitterverse is simply Twitter.  It can be on the computer, your phone, news media, etc.  The use and discussions going on on Twitter are often referred to as the Twitterverse (hence the universe). It is everything Twitter related, from the people to the apps to Twitter.com itself.

There is also a website called the Twitterverse.com.  As of today, they are under construction. Not sure what they will be doing with that, but it is not affiliated with Twitter.  They are just fans, like me. :)

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Twittermoms

Posted on May 1, 2009 by Barbara

The Twitterverse is LOADED with moms who tweet.  There are thousands and thousands.  Mom bloggers spend their days sharing some useless and some not so useless information on Twitter and loving every moment of it.

twittermoms

To take it a step futher, Twittermoms.com launched back in Sept of 08.  Megan Calhoun, the founder of Twittermoms has been a HUGE resource in providing an additional platform for moms to network and continue to build an online community. Within the first year, Twittermoms has grown into a group of over 17,000 moms and is countinues to add hundreds of moms daily.

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Locking Your Twitter Account

Posted on April 12, 2009 by Barbara

image credit http://tomboone.comWhen you register for Twitter there is an option for you to “protect” your account.

What that means is that people will have to send a request to follow you and you will have to approve them.  This is great if you are planning on devulging secret information or detailed personal stories or locations that you don’t want anyone to have access to.

If you are using Twitter for business purposes I would not suggest locking your account, but rather creating a personal one if you feel you need to seperate the two.

Check out this great post on the topic of protecting your tweets.

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Am I Too Old to Twitter?

Posted on April 9, 2009 by Barbara

Heck NO! In fact the oldest Twitter user on record in 104 years old and she has over 23,ooo followers!  That’s right.  Her name is Ivy.

ivybean104

Are you too old to Twitter?  That’s like saying you are too old to have friends.  The beauty about Twitter is that you can search for and find friends that share similar interests as you do.  Say for example you are in to Bingo? You can search Twitter for people that are talking about Bingo. Start conversations with them and possible make friends.

Don’t let your kids or grand kids tell you you can’t tweet.  There is so much available to you out there on Twitter.  Have fun, but be careful.  There are also lots of scammers.

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How Do You Tweeter?

Posted on April 5, 2009 by Barbara

You don’t.

You can be a “tweeter” by using twitter, but you can’t “tweeter”.

The act of sending a message through Twitter is called a “tweet” or a “twitter”. Some people do make the mistake of going to tweeter.com, as of now there is nothing there. Make sure you go to the correct website to sign up www.twitter.com.

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Twitpic

Posted on April 2, 2009 by Barbara

A picture says a thousand words. On Twitter, you only have 140 characters, so to share a picture you have to use on outside source like Twitpic.  If you have a Twitter account then you automatically have a Twitpic account.  All you need to do is go to Twitpic and sign in.  You will then be given an email address.  That email address is your road to tweeting images.

twitpic-logo

When you take an image on your phone, just select the option to email it and send it to the twitpic email address.  It will be some sort of version with your username.number@twitpic.com.  Whatever you want to say about the image can be put in the subject box of your email message and will come out in the tweet.

You can’t use the email address to get emals, so don’t share it with anyone.

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Do Celebrities Tweet?

Posted on March 5, 2009 by Barbara

Yes. Celebrities are tweeting. In many cases it’s not really the celebrity themselves, but probably their assistant. None the less, they are on there.

Since June 2009 Twitter has added the “Verified Accounts” certification to high profile Twitter users.  This is an attempt to derail the celebrity squatters (people who steal your name). Although if you are a celeb and not on Twitter you are really failing IMO.

In recent news Ashton Kutcher reached 1 million followers.  He tweets a lot about politics too if you are in to that.  My favorite is Shaq.

Here’s one reason why.

oprah-shaq-twitter

To find out which celebrities are tweeting go to Celebrity Tweet.

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