Twitter guide let me organise you 2013

By Rebecca Harvey

Free Report Coffee & Cake Guide to Twitter

Let Me Organise You Do you need help with Twitter for YOUR business? Don't know your Tweets from

your Trends? Worried about # Hashtags?

Just call me your Business Princess…

Rebecca Harvey Virtual Assistant specialising in New Media | Let Me Organise You

[email protected] | www.letmeorganiseyou.co.uk | @letmeorganiseu © 2013, All rights reserved

The Let Me Organise You (Coffee & Cake) Guide to Twitter ‘Get Dressed’ – Usernames & Profiles Contents:

• Join Twitter • Choose an appropriate Username • Upload a Photograph • Follow @LetMeOrganiseU(!) • Create your Biography • Add your Location • Add a link to your Website

How to join Twitter Go to http://twitter.com. Sign up to twitter on this front page as highlighted in Figure 1.

• In the first box type your full name • In the second box type your e-mail address • In the third box type a password, this can be anything you choose, but make

sure it is memorable • Finally click the ‘Sign up’ button.

Figure 1. You’re now presented with the Join Twitter screen, and this is where it could get a bit tricky. You need to choose a user name:



How to Choose a Username Your Username, or Twitter ID, can be a maximum of 15 characters long, however making it as short as possible helps it to be memorable, and also means you have more room in your tweets for your marketing message, when it comes to retweeting. You can change your Username in the future, but its best to see if you can get it right first time, as it can confuse your followers. So how to choose one? Firstly, each username is unique, so twitter won’t let you choose one, which is already in use. People relate to people better than they do to brands or company names, so if you are a self-employed professional, or the CEO of your organisation, consider using your own name. Avoid using numbers and hyphens at all costs as this will make it harder for people to be able to search and find you online. It’s also almost impossible to remember. You might also want to ensure that your social identity is consistent across all social media platforms – it makes it easier for your customers to find you, as they only have to remember one username. It also makes it easy for search engines to aggregate your social content into one recognizable stream. NOTE: Usernames are not case sensitive, but the convention is to capitalise for ease of reading.



Congratulations! You now have your very own Twitter account. We believe in getting dressed before going networking and inviting people to view your profile, so we’re going to skip the next couple of steps, and come back to them when your profile has been perfected: So . . . 1. On the Interests screen, just click the blue [Next Step] button in the centre at the bottom.

2. On the Friends screen, just click the grey [Skip Import] button in the centre at the bottom.



Here’s the Twitter dashboard as you see it for the first time:

On the right hand menu, in blue, you can see that Twitter makes some great suggestions for getting started. First of all, we recommend that you follow us, so that you can read all our tweets in your timeline. To do this you type: @letmeorganiseu in the box that says “find users by name” then click on [Search]. This brings up a list of users, with us at the top (hopefully!) Click on the grey [Follow] button, and it changes to a happy green button with a big tick to show you are following us. When you hover on it, it becomes an angry red button with a big cross to show that you can unfollow us. Click it a few times, Twitter’s quite fast. Perhaps follow others in the list (see anyone familiar?) Make sure you leave the button looking like this.

If you like, you can see if any of your friends are on Twitter using the [Search] field, but we recommend waiting until after we’ve done the next bit… Perfecting your Profile.



Who Am I?

I’m asked time and again “What do I tweet about?” Everyone is aware of the rogue tweeters who discuss what flavour coffee they’re drinking, and other banalities of the day. We’re all agreed, we don’t want to follow these people, and we certainly don’t want to be them. “What do I tweet about?” is a question we’ll be revisiting over the next few days – and hopefully answering quite thoroughly. To start with, you need to think about why you are on Twitter at all, and what you want to get out of it. Do you know why are you here?

• Do you want to follow celebrities and indulge in gossip about their private lives?

• Do you want to follow breaking world news stories? • Do you want to find out what’s going on in your local music scene? • Do you want to moan about your family life and look for sympathy? • Do you want to indulge your passion for bird-watching/knitting/scuba- diving? • Do you want to find people who may be interested in doing business with

you?



Twitter can be used for all of these things (though not very successfully all at the same time). So what do you want to do with it? On Twitter, you really do attract what you put out there, as every word you put in your profile will be used by others to seek you out using profile-searching tools, and once they have found you, to decide whether they will follow you. So people will judge you by your profile and your tweets and will choose whether to “tune in” and listen to more, or to walk on by. So you need to be very clear who it is you want to attract to your profile and encourage to follow you and talk to you, and what words you need to be using to attract them. There’s room for personality, of course, but we’re here to put Twitter into action for business, so this is your professional persona that we want your profile to represent.



Your Twitter Profile: Your Twitter Bio On Twitter you get 160 characters (including punctuation and spaces) to describe who you are and/or whom you want to meet and/or why people should follow you. Make your biography interesting and friendly, but make sure you get some keywords in there too. Notice that there is a separate location field, so you don’t need to put geographical data in your Bio. You’ve got 160 characters, so get creative! Practice makes perfect… Your Twitter Picture A picture says a thousand words, and as you only get 140 characters in a tweet, and 160 in a bio, your picture is going to be a big part of your first impression on Twitter. Research shows that 64% more people will connect with you if you have a photograph - 12% more than that if you are smiling and making eye contact with the camera. Certainly, you don’t want the default coloured egg that tells everyone you really don’t care:

You may think it’s more appropriate to have a logo for your profile picture, or a cartoon. Have a look at the ones on page 7, and see what appeals to you. Who would you follow, and why? How much does the picture influence you? You need to create a square picture of about 120x120 pixels. Bearing in mind over two thirds of people who access social networks do so on a mobile or tablet device, you need your face to be as recognisable as possible. Ready to upload your photo? Click on the Photo button beside your name, and follow the instructions:



Your Twitter Profile Underneath your picture you’ll find an “Edit your profile” link (see previous graphic). Click on this to open up your Profile page, which has this menu across the top:



Explore the other menus, and then click on “Profile”, and fill in the details requested:

Location, Location, Location The location field is important if your business serves a particular area. You can put a list of towns, but you only get 30 characters in total, and naming more than one town will restrict how easily you can be found and ranked by location specific search tools.



Website If you don’t have a website, consider sending visitors to your LinkedIn profile instead. Next we will look at how to build up Following people on Twitter. Find and Follow How to find people by name:

1. Type the person's name into the search box at the top of your Twitter homepage.

2. Results for your search will show up under the People tab on the search results page.

3. You can also search by typing the person's name into the search box on the Connect page.

How to browse accounts by interest:

1. From the Discover page, click Browse categories. 2. Click on any interesting category. You'll be shown a list of accounts you may

want to follow. 3. You can also browse by interest using the search box at the top of the Browse

categories page. Type in a topic (like "news" or "basketball") or a descriptive phrase (such as "ballet dancer" or "actor") and you'll see a list of account results for that search term.



How to browse Twitter's suggestions:

1. On the Discover page, click on Who to follow. 2. Browse suggestions Twitter have generated for you based on whom they think

you might find interesting. 3. Click Follow to follow any user, or click their username to learn more about

them.



Etiquette and Conversations Following Back One of the most common ways to discover new people on Twitter is by watching for the email notifications it sends when someone follows you (If you’re not getting the email notifications, check your account settings). You can check them out and see if they’re worth following back. Twitter Etiquette for Beginners Many new Twitter users want to know what the rules are, or whether Twitter has standard protocol and etiquette. Beyond Twitter's standard Terms of Service, Twitter etiquette is simple: Be genuine and non-deceptive and provide value. Otherwise, just use Twitter how it suits you. Beyond the simple regulations, you can't really use Twitter in a right or wrong way because no two people use it for exactly the same reasons. Although users love Twitter's largely rule-free nature, some generally accepted behaviours have evolved over time. You can ease your transition into the culture of Twitter by getting familiar with these behaviours. You may encounter confusing, even conflicting, advice and back seat tweeting from the handful of people on Twitter who aren't comfortable without rules. Don't take them too seriously; Twitter just isn't that rigid. Tweeting frequency Some Twitter users are considered noisy because they tweet so much, whereas others can come across as standoffish because they don't tweet frequently. A good rule when you're starting out is to post at least four or five tweets per day. You'll most likely find yourself tweeting much more often than that, but if you aren't yet fully comfortable with it, use that number to get started. When using Twitter for business, and if you plan to link to your products or posts on your blog, find a balance between the number of tweets that promote yourself and the number of tweets that provide value. You might think of this balance as an actual ratio. For example, for every link of your own that you place on Twitter, send out at least five tweets that inform, engage, and converse. If conversation and engagement are your aim, you definitely want to keep a human voice in your Twitter stream at all times. Engaging others on Twitter On Twitter, engagement is the name of the game. Whether you use Twitter for business or fun, you don't just want to sit back and watch the stream flow by — you want to genuinely interact with people.



Your early days on Twitter will probably be pretty quiet when it comes to replies and conversation. All those twitterers are just getting to know you, after all. Don't worry; after a few of your tweets appear in the timeline and you add a few contacts to your network, people will begin to notice you. #Hashtagging The Twitter Hash Tag: What Is It and How Do You Use It? Once you've started using Twitter, it won't take long before you come across what's known as a hash tag. That's when you see something in a tweet that has a # prefix. (The # is a hash symbol, hence the term hash tag or hashtag.) Take for example the hashtag #lost. The good thing about the hash tag is that if someone wrote a tweet without putting the word LOST in the main message, it will still show up in your search because of the tag. Eg. "Who is hotter? Jack, Sawyer, or Desmond? The flip side is that if you search using the tag, and someone wrote a tweet about the show without including it, that tweet won't show up in your results, even if LOST appears in the text. Eg. "Do you think LOST has jumped the shark?" In a way, hash tags allow you to create communities of people interested in the same topic by making it easier for them to find and share info related to it.



Where do hash tags come from? I think this question gets to the heart of the confusion about them because hash tags are NOT any kind of official Twitter function. The company has not created a list of topics that we can browse through to see if there's one that interests us. So where DO they come from? Any user can create one simply by adding it to their own tweet. For example, when the plane went down in the Hudson River a couple of years ago, some Twitter user wrote a post and added #flight1549 to HIS tweet. For something like this, where tweets would have been flying fast and furiously, it worked.

As you can see, it's a very organic process that works simply because of a group mindset that people like to categorise topics and this is one way to make it easier to do so. TV Shows will often put their own hashtag up on the screen within the initial credits of that show. How do I track topics of interest to me? Let's say I'm interested in basket weaving. The first thing I would do is a basic Twitter search on the term itself so I can see if someone's already created a related hash tag.



If you look at the above picture of results, while there are plenty of tweets with the term "basket weaving" in them, there aren’t any that have included a hash tag. So we haven’t really narrowed down any potential people to follow due to their love of basket weaving. So now if I want to create a community of people who will share their love of basket weaving, I'll create my own hash tag. Note: Before you create your own tag, you might want to search on a few variations to make sure they are not being used for something else e.g. try #basketweaving or #weaving Since the tag will use up some of the 140-character limit, I want to keep it fairly short, while still making it precise. For example, #basketweave is shorter. To make this hash tag "live", all I need to do is write a tweet and add the hashag in using the # key on the keyboard. Retweets and how to get Retweeted Earning retweets exposes your messages to a broader audience as your follower’s followers see your tweets via retweets. Stick to the following guidelines and you should be fine!



• More than 50 percent of all retweets contain links. • Nearly 1.5 percent of overall tweets are retweets. • Nearly 80 percent of all retweets are news-related. • Retweets that contain a self-reference are less likely to be retweeted. • Retweets that mention Twitter are more likely to be retweeted than those that

mention Facebook. • Simply asking for a retweet can boost a tweet’s retweetability.

If you would like to find out more about using Twitter for your business then please Contact Me using the details below. Rebecca Harvey, Let Me Organise You, Virtual Assistant, Leicestershire Offering a Bespoke One Stop Virtual Support Service to Small Businesses. She will do all of those 'things' on your To-Do List that you do not want to or have the time to do. Solutions offered include Social Media Help, Email Marketing, Blogging, and Website Design & Development. As well as 'Office' solutions; Spreadsheets, presentations, Invoicing, Book Keeping, and Receipt Creation. All services are also offered as New Media Tech Trained Subjects, so businesses can get to grips with 'doing it themselves!'.

© 2013 Let Me Organise You, All Rights Reserved

Let Me Organise You


[email protected] | www.letmeorganiseyou.co.uk | @letmeorganiseu

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Twitter guide let me organise you 2013