Okay, so I hope I’ve managed to convince you of the marketing benefits of getting your small business on Twitter. Now, as promised here is SMEketing’s guide to getting started. It’s extremely simple; however it does come with a warning though – Twitter can be seriously addictive!

Create an account and set up your profile:

The key things here are:

• Your username: which will show as twitter.com/username
• Your bio: to summarise what you do so people know whether or not they will be interested in following you. Do not leave this blank! I rarely follow anyone who doesn’t have a bio
• Your picture: as a rule, if you’re on Twitter as a small business use your corporate logo (this may have to be modified to fit in the small box Twitter provide. If you cannot do this yourself, then get in touch and for a very small fee SMEketing can do this for you. Unless you’re an existing customer, then we’ll provide this service free of charge until the end of June 2009 – get in touch with your SMEketer to receive this freebie). If you do use a logo as your picture, make sure you put your actual name on your profile. For example, our Twitter name is SMEketing, but under our profile the name listed is Victoria Walmsley (me) as I am the one who manages SMEketing’s Twitter account. Twitter, like all social media marketing, is about being transparent. People want to know exactly who they are dealing with
• Your background: this is a good article on branding yourself with a Twitter background

Start following people with similar interests/industries/geographical area are you:

This is important – as a general (ish) rule, when you follow someone, there’s a good chance they’ll follow you back. So you need to follow people who may be interested in your services. Use Twellow and JustTweetIt to find people to follow. You should also look for existing customers and suppliers. Basically anyone who you’d like to network with. This is where personal bio’s come in handy – they’ll help you decide quickly if that person/business is of interest to you. It’s no point following loads of people in New York City if your small business has  a customer catchment area in Southampton, Hampshire UK.

Start Tweeting!

Now that you are following people you will be able to see their tweets and so you can now get involved with the conversations. If you see someone tweeting a question, or talking about a subject that you’re a specialist in – get stuck in! Remember though, Twitter is not a direct sales tool – people will quickly remove you from their follow lists if you try the hard sale. Twitter is about conversation and networking. Giving out free advice, tips and relevant links/info to your network will soon help boost your Twitter profile, and in turn, your small business brand.

Make sure you don’t spam tweet. There is nothing worse than logging into your Twitter account, only to find a dozen tweets, all from the same person, all following a similar thread. Tweets such as “Fully manages PPC solutions from SMEketing: http:www.tinyurl.oom/123″ , followed by “Rebranding? Logo design for small businesses: http:www.tinyurl.com/124″ = those kind of tweets, listed in quick succession will irritate people very quickly and you will soon find the number of followers you have dropping (fyi – due to the limited character content, when posting URLs, go to http://bit.ly/ first to shorten it).

You will soon find that you are interacting with a select group of people more than others. This is great – Twitter is about building relationships. So your next move is to take it to the next level – ask for their MSN details/email address/phone number etc, and see if you can arrange to meet up. Anyone who can provide you with new business, or new business referrals are worth their weight in Twitter gold!

Okay, so I don’t want this blog post to get too long – Twitter is a huge topic and I could bang on about it all day.

My last and final Twitter tips are the tools you can use to manage your account. I won’t go into too much depth here – the best thing is to just get stuck in and use them. If you do want more advice as to how to manage your Twitter account to receive maximum return on your (time) investment, get in touch with SMEketing and we’ll happy talk you through it.

• TweetDeck: Use this to give you an overview of what’s happening on Twitter – view all the updates, replies, direct messages, and set up specific keyword related searches to see who’s talking about your interests
• Hashtags: Hashtags (#) enable you to track and follow conversations on Twitter. If SMEketing were to run an event called ‘SMEketer Southampton’ we’d maybe use #SMESo’ton as a hashtag at the end of each tweet that was related to that event.
• MrTweet: Another tool to help you find relevant people to follow
• Twitter Search: If you’re not searching for your keywords via TweetDeck, use Twitter Search

There are hundreds of Twitter tools out there – for more information on these and others, just type ‘Twitter Tools’ into Google and you’ll find 75,500,000 results to look through!!

And finally, now that you’re up and running on Twitter – dont’ forget to follow us at @SMEketing: twitter/SMEketing.  Tweet you later!