Twitter for Dummies - Laura Fitton [80]
If you have a more conversational Twitter account that you still want to connect to your professional life, make about half your tweets personal, fun, or off-topic, and the other half about your business. If you prefer to deliver business value all the time, set up your account to curate and cultivate links about events, essays, news, and ideas that are relevant to your field, in addition to promotional tweets so that you can still push your brand (without making that the only thing you do). Whatever you do, be useful. Offer value. You want to keep people engaged, which is what Twitter is all about.
Engage. While you listen and talk on Twitter, be sure to also interact with other twitterers. Twitter is a communications tool, and although it’s based on a one-to-many concept, it works best when you make friends and have real conversations right in the Twitter stream. Sometimes when you find people talking about subjects relevant to your business you can offer helpful contributions to their conversations! When it comes to business, public relations, and customer service (which we talk about in the following sections), you absolutely need to engage other people on Twitter.
Connect. Use the ability to take conversations offline and into the real world via tweetups, events, and meetings to your business’s advantage. Twitter makes finding ways to meet and engage with customers in real life easy, and therein lies its largest business value. Bring your business’s conversations and connections beyond the 140-character limit.
Public relations
You can use Twitter as a fantastic public-relations channel, whatever kind of business you work for. It offers global reach, endless connections, networking opportunities, a promotion platform, and immediate event planning and feedback. Best of all, if you float your ideas out there in genuine, valid, and interesting ways, others can pick them up and spread them around. Many Twitterers — from individuals to large corporations — report scoring numerous press opportunities as a result of engaging other Twitterers and sharing on the Twitter platform.
Some traditional public relations firms may be intimidated by Twitter’s potential to connect stories, sources, and journalists. Many of them don’t yet see the opportunity, or they’re thinking about it too narrowly. Twitter is just one more tool — albeit a powerful and efficient one — to add to your arsenal if public relations is important to your business. Twitter simply gives you a way to make what you do more accessible to people who might otherwise not hear your message.
You may have heard about Twitter in the first place in the context of a mainstream news story about an event of global importance that was first reported via citizen journalism on Twitter — such as the emergency landing of a commercial airplane in the Hudson River in January 2009. Indeed, Twitter is an exceedingly powerful tool for detecting breaking events. You don’t always get in-depth analysis (at least, not until links to longer writings about the story begin to spread), but you do frequently find yourself way ahead of the game when a story breaks if you’re on Twitter.
Journalists and PR practitioners are among some of Twitter’s most avid users, and they do some pretty interesting things with it. On Monday nights, professionals from both sides of the field gather to talk about current stories, their professions, and the future of media, all by simply tagging their tweets with the word #journchat. Because #journchat is an agreed-on tag and a longstanding event, people know to point their search tools (or http://search.twitter.com) at that word and watch the conversation scroll by.
It was Twitter innovator @PRSarahEvans who came up with the idea for #journchat, and the community she built catapulted