Monday, April 4, 2011

Twitter for Business: How Business Happens in 140 Characters

How impossible it seemed just a few years back to talk, share and collaborate in just 140 characters? How about if we say today doing just this has made twitter a billion dollar venture, at least in their valuation?

Many of our partner Small and Medium Enterprises have previously expressed their inability to understand as to how a simple tool called twitter be used for business? How can talking in just 140 characters help a business grow?

These are critical questions and read on, because this blog post will answer them!

Lets understand what is twitter?
Wikipedia, one of the most trusted sources for any information online says: "Twitter is a website owned and operated by Twitter Inc. which offers a social networking and microblogging service, enabling its users to send and read messages called tweets. Tweets are text-based posts composed of up to 140 characters displayed on the user's profile page. Tweets are publicly visible by default; however, senders can restrict message delivery to just their followers. Users may subscribe to other users' tweets – this is known as following and subscribers are known as followers[8] or tweeps[9] (Twitter + peeps)."

Simply speaking, twitter is a micro-blogging service! Why micro? 'Micro' because of its form. You are allowed to share content/ make status updates to a limit of only 140 characters. Unlike in a blog (like the one you are reading) which is a full text piece of information.

What are tweets?
Tweets essentially is nothing but the 'status updates' you do on twitter.  Just like you have a personal profile on various social networking websites, similarly your profile updates on twitter are called tweets.

How do I create a profile on twitter and login to the same and hmmm, make my first tweet?
Lots of work at once, but lets help you do it. To do your first tweet all you need to do is follow the following process:

  • go to the website: www.twitter.com, which will look something like this
  • If you are new to twitter and need to make your a/c, click on "Sign up" and create your profile by entering the required information as shown in the screen capture below

  • Once you have your account created, sign in with your login information and you will be logged into your account
  • To make your first tweet all that you need to do is write anything within 140 characters in the text box appearing in the Center top of the screen, which also says: What's Happening?
  • While you are doing the update the character count will be displayed below and hence you will be able to keep a check on whether you are keeping within the character limit

So that was about your first tweet!

How can I really leverage the power of twitter for my business?
Twitter is merely an online tool, just like many others. What makes it important to your business actually depends upon your business objectives and whether it is capable of even fulfilling the same or not.

Eg: if your business objective is to connect with users globally who are relevant to your business (if you are a shoe retailer), then you can actually do a global search for users on twitter using keywords like: shoe/ shoes/ shoe retail.

The above search bar shows the search term 'shoes', so lets say you are a shoe retailer/ seller and are interested in knowing people who are talking about shoes on twitter, you can do it by doing a simple search on twitter for the keyword: shoes.

Twitter also automatically gives you suggestions for which are the relevant profiles that you should follow for the topic of your interest/ relevance.

This is just one of the business benefits. You can essentially connect with many relevant people globally in your domain. One of the biggest benefits of twitter is to drive relevant traffic to your website.

We shall soon be featuring top twitter tools for making your life easier with twitter!!

If you wish to know more on leveraging online tools for your business, our team of experts at IndiaMART Knowledge Services will be happy to help. Drop in a comment to this post OR contact us on our website: www.indiamart.com!



No comments:

Post a Comment