What the heck is Twitter and how do I use it?

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Everyone wants to use Twitter; everyone else tells you that you should use Twitter; most people don’t understand Twitter; some people have a vague understanding of Twitter; often the usefulness of Twitter may vary depending on who you talk to.

While there’s not enough space in this article to fully explain the in-and-outs of Twitter, I do want to give you a few tangible examples of how we use Twitter to benefit our company:

1.    Networking – Twitter has a very useful search feature. You can use http://search.twitter.com regularly to search for people that are talking about subjects in which you have an interest. Once you find them, engage these Twitterers by following them and striking up a conversation by @Reply-ing to their Tweets.

Think of this as doing what you do when you go to a conference. You walk into a room full of strangers and wander around until you hear a conversation that interests you. Then you mosey on up and try to add something to the conversation. If you say something smart, insightful or funny, you just created a relationship upon which you can build.  Twitter works the same way; you have to engage the other person and strike up conversations that interest them. Many people make the mistake of simple writing about what they had for dinner and expect thousands of people to magically follow them.  You have to be proactive to take advantage of the social component of Twitter.

2.    Self Promotion – As you try to find people that interest you and strike up a relationship, others are doing the exact same thing. Tweet about your successes, your services, your products, your insights. Try to make it entertaining and try to differentiate yourself from the crowd through humor or by having strong opinions or just by being awesome. Be mindful of the verbiage you use and try to use words that people would actually search for. By doing this you are letting people find you and your business.

3.    Customer Support – many companies are now offering customer support via Twitter. Even those companies that don’t have a corporate Twitter account will often have employees that are regular Twitterers and are more than willing to help you out. The advantage to Twitter is that it’s a public forum which creates accountability. There is added incentive for a company to make sure they resolve your issue or answer your question because everyone else can see the conversation. We have a handful of vendors where their traditional email support may take days to reply, in every case they resolve issue we post on Twitter more efficiently. It’s like magic.

We’ve seen many benefits including:  Invitations to be speakers at conferences, requests to host webinars, guest blogging opportunities on industry sites, improved customer service from our vendors, new business opportunities, finding new employees and much more.

Think of Twitter as a new way to get to know someone. It’s a lot more engaging than email and in many ways it is like meeting someone in person and building a normal relationship with them via conversation and sharing interests. Every savvy business person knows the benefits of creating and maintaining good relationships with your customers, peers, vendors, prospects etc. Twitter can help you do that more efficiently than most other technologies.