My top ten Twitter tips (for businesses)

DO

1. Fill out your bio and add a photo. Personally, I won’t follow you if you don’t have both of these. A location can be pretty key too, as well as changing your background image so it’s not just the generic one.
2. Learn the lingo. Twitter is an investment of time, there’s no denying it, so don’t just get it for the sake of it. Look into it first – learn about hashtags and @ tweets, then when you actually sign up, you won’t end up with an empty profile.
3. Interact. No one likes to see a profile that’s all “me me me” – talk to people, reply to questions and comments others make. Social media is all about creating a community.
4. Share. People love it when you share things that are of interest – even more when it’s not your product or business! Shake up your posts a little by mixing in shares from other people’s Twitter feeds, and blogs and websites and such.
5. Post regularly. Here at WebOK we recommend that you post on Twitter at least once a day – preferably more than that! We know it’s difficult, and it will take you a while (sometimes a very long while) to get into the swing of it, but the whole point of Twitter is to be social. Posting regularly doesn’t mean constantly posting new content. It can mean retweeting others posts, linking to a news article or website you’ve found, posting a photo, replying to other people’s tweets…all sorts – just get stuck in!

DON’T

1. Don’t JUST post tweets from Facebook. By all means, connect the two, but when a whole profile reads “posted from Facebook”, it seems a little pointless in having Twitter.
2. Don’t get too personal. There’s only so much people want to know about you. Think before you tweet – whatever you say is public, and generally, the tweets you make that you realise are a mistake, get captured in a screen shot quicker than anything!
3. Don’t swear. As above, everything you say is public, and it will reflect on you and your business – whether you be self-employed, or working for someone else.
4. Don’t make your profile private. When I come across a business that has set their profile as private, it puts me off straight away. The whole point of social media is so that people can find out more about you – people are nosey! If you want to make personal tweets that you don’t want your customers to see, then create a personal account for you to interact with just your friends (but be aware that people will probably find you on this account too!)
5. Don’t shorten too many words. With only 140 characters to get your message across, a lot of people will shorten every word they can within a status – you to “u”, too to “2″, for to “4″, people to “ppl”, tomorrow to “tmoz”, and so on.As a business account, I (personally) feel this looks very unprofessional, and seeing this on someone’s twitter has actually put me off buying from some businesses before.If you don’t have enough space to say what you want, there are a number of options:
   1. Re-word it – quite often you can say the same thing differently and loose 10 characters!
   2. Make it a blog post, and link to it.
   3. Use a service like Twitlonger.

If you think I’ve missed a vital do or don’t of Twitter, please let me know in the comments below!