What is Twitter and how can I use it?
Twitter is a brilliant tool. Everyone who uses it raves about it and it can do wonderful things for your website traffic. I’ve even won business through it and set up an extremely lucrative business partnership with someone that I met through it.
But on first viewing, it can be very difficult to actually figure our what to actually DO with it!
Don’t worry - you’re not alone, and in fact, most people take a while to figure out the best way to use Twitter for their own good.
First a simple overview.
Twitter is extremely simple. You can type anything you want into a ‘status‘ box, up to 140 characters long. You can also ‘follow‘ other people. Every time that someone you’re following types a new status, it is displayed on your Twitter home page. Likewise, anyone who is following you will see your new status once you have updated it.
That is the simple premise of it. The more people you follow, the more statuses you will see on your home page (left). Obviously you’re not going to be interested in every single person on Twitter, so you will generally only want to follow people that are of interest to you.
The next step then, is to find people that share your interests. I can assume that if you’re reading this blog you’ll be interested in people that are involved in website marketing.
The easiest way to find people with the same interests would be to go to Twitter search tool, and type in a few keywords. What this tool does is list every person on 
Twitter that has typed those keywords into their status in the past few days.
Here you can see a search and the results for ‘website marketing’. If I find those statuses interesting then I can view more from that person by clicking on their picture. If I think that they might be of interest to me, then I’ll follow them.
So how can this help your business?
What you want to do is attract some followers. To do that, you have to ensure that what you’re typing into your status field is useful and relevant to the people that you want to attract. For example, if I want to attract people interested in website marketing, one of my statuses might read ‘Looks like my SEO is working - my website is ranking at #2 for my target keyword’.
This does two things - firstly it shows that you know your stuff and it also includes the word SEO, so that if someone is looking to follow someone who knows about SEO, your status will appear in Twitter’s search.
You will also find that when you follow someone, they’ll follow you back. So before you know it, you have a good number of followers and every time you speak, they’re reading your words.
This can obviously be used to your advantage. If you have a new blog post, or an article on your website that’s likely to be of interest to your followers then you can tweet (the name given to updating your status) about it. Suddenly you’ll find that your followers on Twitter are on your website reading your blog.
And so it goes from there. Twitter followers -> Blog readers -> RSS Subscribers -> Newsletter Subscribers - Clients.
It’s a simple tool, but it’s extremely powerful.
There are lots of articles about Twitter, but here are two more to get you started:
What is Twitter and why do you use it?
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