Twitter for Dummies - Laura Fitton [78]
Maintain boundaries. Try to be aware of how you are (or aren’t) maintaining boundaries with the people you interact with frequently on Twitter. Especially before you agree to meet someone in person, take a look at how you’ve interacted in the past and make sure that you’ve kept your relationship clear from the start, whether it’s for business or friendship.
Protecting personal details
Many people opt to not even use the real names of family members or children who don’t use Twitter. Twitterers commonly refer to relatives, friends, and kids by nicknames or initials, just to give those loved ones a layer of protection. Use a bit of caution and ask permission before tweeting someone’s real name (or any other information that we mention). Laura, for example, uses her daughters’ initials S and Z, as shown in Figure 10-7. Twitter is a powerful influence on search engines, so casual mentions of unique names remain findable for a long time. If Laura even used their first names on her tweets (which all also contain her last name), they’d likely appear visibly in Google search results for their firstname lastname. Don’t believe her? A Google search for Z Fitton brings up two recent tweets about her antics.
The same words of caution go for any number of personal details. Dive into information about your health or your private life in private conversation. Although being authentic and a little bit personal goes a long way on Twitter, everyone understands that you need a layer of privacy to keep you, your loved ones, and the details about them safe.
Figure 10-7: Laura (@pistachio ) referencing her spawn in a tweet.
Things you probably shouldn’t say on Twitter
You definitely want to keep some information to yourself when you’re tweeting away:
Your home address
Your home or cellphone number
Your kids’ names
Your financial information (such as credit card numbers, your yearly income, and anything else you wouldn’t want the whole world to know)
Vital health details (such as diseases you have or a diagnosis you just received — unless you’re comfortable with the world knowing about it)
Details about schools and other locations where you or people you know spend time — you never know who might drop in after seeing your tweet on a Google search
Maximizing privacy and safety
After you Twitter for a while, you’ve given away a lot of information about yourself. If you mention who you spend time with or that you always hang out at a certain cafe, someone can start tracking where you’ve been and what you’re doing. We don’t want to scare you — but whenever you post in a public medium, anyone could go through the information you’ve published, later on, and start piecing things together. Laura loves the unique charms of her neighborhood and street, but she keeps the details really fuzzy, preferring Boston as specific enough.
Chapter 11
Twitter for Business
In This Chapter
Putting your business on Twitter
Using Twitter to make your business look good
Creating a network on Twitter and communicating with it
Getting and giving useful information on Twitter
So, you want to find out more about what Twitter can do for your business. In this chapter, we cover some of the essentials, explain what some other businesses have tried, and point you in the right direction to get started yourself.
The Business of Twitter
People often ask Laura, “What’s the business use of Twitter?” Laura frequently answers with a different question, “What’s the business use of e-mail?” It’s not that the technologies are similar or play the same role; it’s that Twitter has the potential to filter into every possible aspect of business as a versatile communications platform and problem-solving tool. Both technologies are extremely open communication platforms that have uses way beyond the marketing and customer-engagement layer. Twitter can impact pretty much everything, from the way enterprise software works to how project status is shared. It can fundamentally change communication