Twitter 101 Chapter 1

What’s the deal with Twitter, and how can you use it to advertise? Just to make sure I’m leaving anyone behind I’ll give a brief description of what Twitter is and how it works. Twitter is essentially microblogging. Each user on Twitter can tweet (that means post something on twitter, by the way if your company can invent wildly used verbs, that’s usually a good thing.) as often as they would like but each tweet must under 140 characters. This restriction on the length of tweets is probably much of the reason that Twitter became as popular as it is. People like quick snapshot posts they can read in a second or two. Twitter forces everyone to do this.


If you don’t have a Twitter account, sign up for one right now. Twitter is set up to allow each user to decide who they follow. If you follow a particular user you will receive all of that user’s tweets. So if your company sets up a Twitter account your goal will be to have lots of followers because each follower is a potential reader of your tweets. Even though you want lots of followers, don’t freak out if someone unfollows you. Following and unfollowing someone on Twitter is as easy as clicking a button. People change who they follow all the time and you’ll never know why so don’t sweat it. As long as it’s a small number of people that’s totally normal, don’t worry about it.


Twitter recently released several ways that businesses can buy advertising on Twitter. But before you consider these options you should first establish a presence on Twitter. However, before you start tweeting make sure you understand how people use Twitter so you can make appropriate tweets. Twitter is an extremely real time social media. People don’t tweet about what they did last week they tweet about what they are currently doing, and so should you. News sources will utilize this aspect of Twitter and tweet breaking news stories. Companies will often tweet their most recent releases or upcoming events related to the company. Tweet only current or upcoming news.


While Twitter is used to tell the world about the latest news, it’s also somewhat of a public never-ending cocktail party. There are constantly random tweets about movies, food, sports, and pretty much every conceivable topic. Today one of the popular trends was #for65milliondollars. Users would then insert this into their tweets. For examples: #for65milliondollars I’d go to a Justin Bieber concert. This is an example the types of conversations that can happen on Twitter, so as a company it’s okay to be casual and conversational with your Twitter followers, in fact, they’ll probably enjoy it.  We’ll be coming out with more on Twitter including tips and tricks and what works and doesn’t work when trying to have a successful twitter campaign.

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