You want me to “tweet”?
May 26th, 2009 by Michael Giuffrida
In this frenzy of online marketing and social media, people have come to expect more and more of those who get involved in blogging, FaceBook, Linkedin and now Twitter. Its not enough to have an account or accept a few friend requests anymore, people are looking for constant updates on what you are doing and how you are doing it. I’ll be honest, I really didn’t think I was all that interesting, but believe it or not, fellow “tweeters” are even following me.
So what is this “tweeting’ all about? Twitter is made up “micro-blogs” in which you need to say whatever meaningful tidbit you want to share in 140 characters or less (you can see mine at http://Twitter.com/SMBCEO). I’m no expert -yet- but as far as I can tell, if you have anything going on that you think you would share with a colleague or friend, it is fair game on Twitter.
I struggled at first to find content to Tweet about as I didn’t want anyone to think I was an idiot, but I am finding it easier and easier as I do it more regularly and see what others are sharing. There are folks who spend all day telling you things you probably don’t care about, but by finding the right people to follow I have gained some nuggets of information that I have found pretty useful and probably wouldn’t have found otherwise.
So what are you waiting for? Starting is easy! Go to Twitter, sign up for a free account, and follow me! Once you do that, I found that using a 3rd party application like TweetDeck made it much easier to find new people to follow as well as manage my tweets. There are a bunch of different applications like TweetDeck out there and most that I have seen still have bugs as they are all so new, but if you find one that works for you, it will definitely help. Once you have your management application installed, you can save searches which watch for content that you are interested in. I have a search that looks for the phrase “Business Strategy”. When new tweets containing that phrase show up, I can quickly look to see the profiles of the people posting them and determine if I want to follow them. Once you start following people and tweeting regularly, people will start following you. Its pretty cool actually!
One caveat however, decide how much time you want to devote to this. It could absorb your entire day of you let it!
Happy Tweeting!
Tags: How to get started on Twitter, How to get started tweeting, How to tweet, Social media, Tweeting, Twitter, uses of social media