All the world's a-twitter, 12 Twitter tips for your business

March 4, 11:52 AMAuctions and Antiques ExaminerWalt AuctionWally

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All the world's a-twitter, 12 Twitter tips for your business

If you haven't heard of Twitter, you're probably not online, so your probably not reading this article, so you've heard of Twitter. Everyone is using it from Barack Obama to Britney Spears.

This popular social application, is kind of a Facebook meets texting device.  It's a social networking tool and a business tool, in fact, it's a social business tool for many. Based on the format of texting, (you get only 140 characters to say what you need to say with each message, or tweet) it is quick, concise and easy to use.

While Twitter is super simple to use, it's a lot like the game of Chess, you can learn the basics in 5 minutes, but might work to master it forever. You "follow" people on Twitter, and they follow you. From there you can see each others' conversation threads, see the public time line thread and be seen in it, send private messages and much more.

Below are my tips for using Twitter, feel free to leave your Twitter tips in the comments section, with your twitter ID. There's no need to put the whole URL in your comments, as everyones' Twitter ID is prefixed the same way:
http://twitter.com/auctionwally

Here are my tips for using Twitter for your business.

1. Get TweetDeck, this is a 3rd party app that allows you to organize your Twitter existence. You'll need it or something similar, Twitter is a very busy app.
2. Be relevant to the conversation. I'm into antiques, appraisals auctions and podcasting, so although I through in some social stuff, I keep most of my content on those topics. People have followed you based on a criteria of what your all about, if you stray too far from that, they will unfollow.
3. Provide value, instead of touting your business or it's products, give tips related to your business. For example, I do online appraisals, so a good tweet for me would be: "Need to know period of antique chest? If it has screws, it's after 1830, per Industrial Revolution". Then there is a way to put a link to an article or a site which I may want to entice followers to click on. If you don't have enough characters, you can shorten the links with TweetDeck or other services, but you must stay within 140 characters.
4. Don't spam, this is the quickest way to lose followers. If you put a link to every tweet, if you try make a sale with every tweet, or if you pound a subject to death, that is Twitter spam. There's an 80/20 rule which says that at the most, only put links in 20% of your tweets.
5. Be clever: Witty sayings and humor are appreciated on Twitter.
6. Be helpful to newbies, and re-tweet other useful posts.
7. Post your Twitter username in relevant places.
8. Using the @reply button will help you to get followers. When doing this, if the tweet is interesting, people want to see who's in on the conversation with you. the @reply is one way of showing them this, when you @reply, people will do the same to you, and it's a great way to gain followers.
9. Don't follow, and block any porn sites or robot spam applications.  Yes, unfortunately, they have found Twitter too, the good news is, that they are very easy to block.
10. Don't get involved in flame wars: besides being a waste of time, these tweets are seen by many more people than you realize. Do you want your business contacts to see that you just called your mother-in-law trailer trash?
11. Don't let it suck up all your time! You can actually get more out of less. When you tweet too many times one right after the other, it can clog up the threads of the people following you, and depending on how many people they are following it can be very disruptive.
12. Follow smart people: Below are some of the brightest and most active people I'm following in my ecommerce niche.
     

http://twitter.com/attheboutique

http://twitter.com/Scott_Pooler

http://twitter.com/colderIce

http://twitter.com/eBayandBeyond

http://twitter.com/AuctionBytes

http://twitter.com/TheSavvySeller

http://twitter.com/renagades

and my twitter ID if you care to follow is

http://twitter.com/Auctionwally

Twitter is an evolutionary tool, as I learn more, I'll follow up here in this column, and will ad a more users whom should be on the above list. Feel free to post your Twitter tips and Twitter user name in the comments section.

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