10 Tips – Use Twitter for Business without going mad!

Written by Heather Buckley – 06.08.10

Silicon Beach Training offer a full range of creative software courses including our Photoshop Training, SEO Course as well as HTML5 training,  Social Media Courses, Blogging Courses, and WordPress Training, and if you are tweeting too much and you can’t stop you might need some time management training in Brighton, Sussex!

Things to remember when using twitter for business.

Twitter is addictive

Twitter is time consuming

Twitter can eat you up!

Don’t worry, here are some simple tips to save your sanity as well as your time!

1. Don’t read every tweetlet them tumble off the page like a waterfall
2. Don’t reply to every @ tweet directed to you, you are only human, try keeping a list of big influencers, reply to these first then see what you have time for
3. Use  1-to-1 conversations – DM’s if the conversation isn’t interesting to the whole community
4. Use  Twitter Search to check if someone’s talking about you.
5. Use 3rd party clients like Tweetdeck and Hootesuite make it a lot easier to manage Twitter.
6. Set yourself a twitter time limit
7. Stick to your time limit and no excuses
8. Using a client like tweetdeck and hootesuite save time because of the inbuilt url shorteners
9. Unfollow as many time wasters as you can as you go along don’t wait until you have hundreds
10. Use twitter lists to organise the people that you follow, make a list of the influencers that you do not want to loose interest in you, you can make it a private list. When you are pushed for time tweet and retweet from this list only

Remeber if someone is paying you to tweet or you are doing it for yourself, you should be able to explain the benefits of each interaction or conversation, ask yourself:

• Am I developing a releationship with someone influential on twitter?
• Am I talking to someone or important to the business?
• Am I attracting traffic to the site?
• Am I promoting the business (directly or indirectly)?
• Am I writing something that will get retweeted (is useful to your followers)?
• Am I establishing myself/my business as an expert in the field?

If you cannot answer yes to at least one of the above the close down twitter and so some real work!!

Posted by Heather Buckley in SEO, Social Media on August 6th, 2010| 3 Comments »

How to use and organise twitter lists

Written by Heather Buckley – 29.10.09

Twitter has introduced Twitter Lists to a select group of beta users quite a few by the look of it!

Like “groups” in other 3rd party applications like Hootsuite and Tweetdeck Twitter Lists enable users to follow collections or groups of related Twitter users specify such as geographical location or specific subject area or interest. This will prove invaluable for clients such as ourselves who may want to follow people from a wide range of not necessarily related areas such as project management, design, personal development etc. Creating lists is also great for SEO (we do very good Search Engine Optimisation Training if you need it) if people link to yours!

5 Things you need to know about Twitter Lists

1. Twitter Lists appear as sub-categories like folders containing related users.
2. You can add people to you lists without following them
3. You can follow other people’s lists, too, making it useful to find interesting people to follow for certain subject areas. if you are interested in social media our twitter/social media list is a good one to follow or you could take a look at the Listorious great list of lists to follow!
4. You can add followers to multiple lists, and you can add or delete them easily.
5. Lists can be public or private so you can keep your clients private and your resources public if you wish. Read the rest of "How to use and organise twitter lists"

Posted by Heather Buckley in New Free Resources, Sales & Marketing, SEO, Social Media on October 29th, 2009| 5 Comments »