I’m in a linkedin group dealing with twitter. a member asked for input last month on using twitter as a prospecting channel . as you can imagine, most of the responses came down pretty heavily on the “no freaking way, dude” side. one commenter, an organizational consultant, thanked the group for the learnings and asked about how to get started on twitter. here’s what I sent him:
…I believe that Twitter can be useful to you as a business development tool and possibly as a tool that you can you recommend to some of your larger organizational clients for internal communications. More on that in a second. First, your questions.
1) how to get started
- how do I get started on twitter? go to twitter.com and set up an account. I suggest you set up a personal account, and one for the company. since it’s your company, you can get both with a single address – @krigerconsult, perhaps? NOTE: twitter addresses are marked by starting with the @ symbol; often you will see words in tweets preceded by a # symbol. These are hashtags for topics that users want to see all the input about) and are also searchable. if you have a “trademark” methodology or catchprase, you might want one for that too – @toolsforteens, etc. Twitter is pretty loose on account setup as long as the name is available – you will need a separate email address for each twitter address. In the setup, you will be asked to give a short bio and a URL – this is the first clue for others on whether you are worth following.
- do a search to find people you want to follow. there are a ton of twitterers out there and it is easy to get lost/buried. so find the ones who are talking about stuff you are interested in.for example, I entered “drug abuse schools” in the twitter search box and found a user (no pun intended) called @crashtestaddict. not the one for you – look at who he follows and who follows him. visit their blogs to find other users (in the comment section) or sites that will in turn lead you to other people worth following.
- sign up for @topify – when other users follow you, twitter will send an email with some basic info – then you will need to go to twitter to follow them back. @topify provides more info in the notification message and allows you to follow back by replying to the email (sample below). big time saver.
- you may find that you want a tool to organize those you follow into groups @tweetdeck and @seemic desktop are both useful for this (see below)
2) how to use cell. do you have a smartphone? the streets are filled now with iphone and bberry users who are menacing others bc they are online. there are several apps for using twitter on your phone. here’s a google search page I have an old razr and am tryng not to get sucked in (although I will send the occasional tweet)
oops – didn’t get back to using twitter for biz dev – the basics are in my comment in the “cold calling” question. broad-based is key if you want to make social media a lead generation system. blog. facebook. youtube. twitter. they all feed each other.
as for twitter in the enterprise, recommend you take a look at pistachio consulting – laura fitton’s da bomb on that end of things. she also has or will soon a book out Twitter for Dummies.
would love to talk more about what you want to do and (spoiler: soft pitch ahead) see if I can help you do it.
