This article is part of New Media PH’s Social Media Marketing 101 Series. We will be having several entries in the next few days that talks about the basics of social networking sites for businesses and individuals.
Twitter is a push-based social networking service. Each time you post an update (called Tweets) those who follow you will get it on their stream. However note that not all your tweets will be read by everyone who follows you because they might be offline when it gets pushed to their stream and your tweet has been replaced by more recent tweets of other people they follow.
One of the best things about Twitter is that your followers can hit the “retweet” button to forward your tweet to everyone that follows them making Twitter a very potent viral marketing tool.
Twitter is also a great communication tool. Even if someone isn’t following you, you can send them a message via public replies. This has closed the communication gap between the general public and celebrities, politicians, reporters, TV stations, and government agencies.
This article will teach you how to set-up your Twitter account.
This is pretty straightforward. Just put your full name, e-mail address, and desired password. Note that what you put in your full name will be your user account name (if you put Carlo Ople, your handle will be twitter.com/carloople). You’ll be asked to confirm details in the next page and validate your account by clicking a link from an e-mail that you’ll get.
Twitter will recommend several profiles for you to follow. They’re categorized into niches and even countries. The default is the Philippines and you’ll see a lot of celebrities, public figures, agencies, and brands on the recommended list. Spend sometime picking experts, figures, and brands that you REALLY want to follow. Whatever they tweet will be pushed to your stream so don’t just follow everyone or else you’ll clutter your stream and you won’t enjoy Twitter that much.
The next page will allow you two things: import your e-mail contact list and a search tool for you to find your friends who are on Twitter so you can follow them.
Your profile picture will be the first visual element of your page to the world. Upload a decent, pleasant, and good-looking photo of yourself (don’t forget to smile). It’s important to put a face to your account so that people will feel more at ease with you.
For the description make it short and sweet. Tell them what you do for a living, something personal about yourself, and the link to your website. Check out the examples above.
And that’s it! After this start tweeting as much as you want to.
