Trade Tips: Twitter in Small Steps

Trade Tips: Twitter in Small Steps

By Nicole Hayes

A personal goal for some this year (like myself) is finding more time to practice and/or develop social media outreach skills. Even if you hire/task someone else to conduct your social media outreach, it's imperative you understand the use and impact of such tools. I’ll start with Twitter, which in some respects is outpacing Facebook in advancing conversations. What is Twitter? Per Wikipedia, Twitter is an online social networking service and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, known as "tweets". It was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July. The service rapidly gained worldwide popularity, with over 300 million users as of 2011, generating over 300 million tweets and handling over 1.6 billion search queries per day. It has been described as "the SMS of the Internet." Users can group posts together by topic or type by use of hashtags – words or phrases prefixed with a "#" sign. Similarly, the "@" sign followed by a username is used for mentioning or replying to other users. To repost a message from another Twitter user, and share it with one's own followers, the retweet function is symbolized by "RT" in the message.

Given this basic overview, here are a few Twitter tips for maximizing your outreach:

*Use Hoot Suite application for your phone to manage your tweets on the go

*Use Tweet Deck onto your computer; it's great for managing multiple Twitter accounts and allows you to edit retweets unlike the regular Twitter

*Participate in "Tweet Ups" which are "meet ups" with people/professionals you've met on Twitter you want to know more about/share similar interests (discretion advised)

*Join Twitter chats to engage in regular discussion topics of importance to you, as this will help your dialogues and build your followings

*Socialoomph a tool to help schedule your tweets;

*If you're busy (that's a silly statement) you can also ask friends, your team to push out tweets you've crafted in advance for promoting a campaign, issue

*Tweetreach.com is a tool to measure impact and reach of your tweets via your hash tags used

*Good etiquette and use of social media platforms is like building a relationship: Interact with people, take interest in what others are saying, retweet what they're saying if you like it, thank them for retweeting your tweet, when deciding who to follow it's all about quality of that person not their quantity of followers

*Remember to share information that is helpful to people—don't only tweet the buttered toast you ate for breakfast

Now you’re ready to “tweet tweet!”