Twitter 101 – Using Twitter to Support Your Brand

With so many sources on how to get started in Twitter with intermediate level tips on how to brand, coodinate and even automate your presence, it feels wrong to try and rewrite the common best practices.

So: My favourite, and most definitive guidebook to Twitter is the collection on Mashable. (http://mashable.com/guidebook/twitter/)
Having been shared over 14,000 times on Twitter, the guide is a great place to explore tactics and tools to manage your Twitter presence.

I will take a shot though at summarising some B2B (and B2P remember) practices that I believe are key.

• Stick with that relevant consistent handle across your web presence – I use nickwallen, as it’s just that little more unique than Nick Allen for SEO, but easily associated.
• Build out a relevant Bio, link to your LinkedIn account or blog/website. SEO optimise it.
• Use your Bio as an insight into your persona on Twitter, potential followers will aprpeciate it.
• RT – use traditional retweet annotation or “via” to share ideas with your followers, it’s easier for the originator of the tweet to spot. When you’re RTed, thank the person, you’d do it in real life, so do it on Twitter.
• #Hashtags – choose these relevant to your topic, and set up a twitter search to follow that topic. This is great for RT opportunities, and also allows you to ensure you’re up to date on the topic, find gaps, and add your opinion – show you’re an expert. I’ve got #iStrategy2010 and #E2.0 in my canned searches, which cover key topics I mention in my bio. Remember to join search words, #nick #allen is a totally different search to #nickwallen.
  For exploring #hashtags and websites with info on #hashtags try mashable’s content again.
• Lists – some say pointless, I say lifesaver. Being able to group my friends into manageable sub feeds, means I can be on top when there’s a good nugget to RT – alerts making some suspect I’m on Twitter all day long…
  Try Listorious  http://listorious.com/ to find one that suits you, and to promote your own lists.
• If you’ve got close friends on Twitter, they may be comfortable working with you on idea spreading, at a more formal level. Something I’m exploring at the moment is DM seeding posts to colleagues and CC within tweets, with some success. Or the good old fashion dlist and emailing a RT to colleagues.
  I’ll let you know what I think of http://www.grouptweet.com/ for sharing tweet ideas to a closed group soon.
• Once you’ve got a basic group following you, leverage Follow Fridays #FF, and event #hashtags to let people know of a good colleague to follow, or what a colleague is saying at an event.
• Finally, if your following starts to get too overwhelming or you want to really leverage your key followers, you may consider checking out Friend or Follow – to see who’s not following you back.
  Then to see who’s got the most pull – use Twitter Grader and Klout.

What else would you add?