Twitter can be a great channel to help promote your business, but with such a fast-changing medium, it can be easy to fall in to etiquette traps and bad practice.
Our guide to Twitter for businesses is designed to help small businesses get to grips with Twitter, and avoid the pitfalls we see so often.
1. Customise your profile
Customising your Twitter profile is a great way to tell people what you do when they first find you on Twitter. Be sure to:
- Upload a photograph of yourself, or your company logo;
- Give your real name on your Twitter account: this helps you seem more trustworthy. Where there is more than one person tweeting from the same account, try and differentiate your tweets by adding your initials to the ended of the tweet (e.g., I might add ^RC to the end of a tweet to indicate that Richard Carter had made the tweet);
- Link to your website: a link to your website can provide more information for curious customers;
- If you have space after describing yourself in the biography section of your profile, put your office telephone number and/or email address in it. The easier you making contacting you, the better;
2. Don’t hard-sell
Twitter centres around conversations between people. If you’re just tweeting links to pages on your website, you will most likely fail on Twitter: you need to engage in discussion with other users and build relationships to succeed!