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A Closed Group

Twitter can be used as a communication tool that is only open to people that you want to allow into the conversations. On the “Account” page in “Settings” you can click “Protect my tweets” and then you will be required to approve who will be able to follow you.

Selected Followers

Using twitter in this manner is designed to create an online forum. It includes team members who can interact and keep members of the group informed on the progress of a project they are working on. Gaining a large number of followers is not an object of team communication. The object is getting quick communications in the hands of a select group. Those posted communications are then available for members to read and review at their convenience.

In team communication Twitter can be used to post updates to a project, troubleshoot a problem, or request help. Make sure your team members are familiar with Twitter. Those who are not may need some training and should be encouraged to get familiar with it.

Use Twitter to direct traffic to your websites. You can share information that is useful for prospective clients. You can also share information with employers to enhance your reputation. Use the 140 characters to generate curiosity and provide a link to your website.

Avoid Hard Selling

Don’t pursue hard-sell tactics. You should focus on building relationships. Take full advantage of Twitter and gather information about what customers, competitors and others are saying about your business.

You need to figure out what you can learn and what you can offer. From there you will generate contacts that will help you reach your goals.

Twitter Is On The Move

Twitters monthly unique visitors reached 96 million in August. That’s 1 million more that MySpace had. And part of that jump is because they are making significant changes to the service. A lot of that has come in the last week or so with their update in the service. It is now easier to access photos, videos and other information on the site. Previously, a third party site had to be included.

The Hand Crafted Pen Business

Here is a video on how a craftsman uses a blog and Twitter to market his products. It shows a great example of how a business can use blog posts linked to Twitter to promote it’s unique products.

The video is over 15 minutes and starts a little slow. But some good points are made on how to post your messages and how to create a relationship with your followers.

Show Your Passion

RichardInk is the Twitterer being referred to in this video. He creates hand crafted pens. Every item is unique. When he starts a new projects, he posts it on his blog. And when his post it on his blog, his blog is set up to automatically post on Twitter. When he learns a new trick about his work, he posts it. When he completes a project, he posts it and he posts his asking price for the pen he has just created. When he sells the item, he posts it. Get the idea?

Through his tweets and the logging of his work schedule, Richard allows his followers to see the passion for what he does.

Make Yourself A Human

Outside of his blog Richard is posting his interesting daily activities directly onto Twitter and responding to messages. Notice I said “interesting daily activities” (he doesn’t note every time his is walking into the grocery store). Followers keep track of what he is doing. Of course, they are not watching him every minute of the day but when someone sees an interesting post, they can click on his name and see all of the posts his has made in reverse chronological order.

Take a look at his video and see if you could use this strategy:

I post many of my projects on my SmallBusinessWebsite.com blog and it is linked to post automatically on my Twitter account. What do you post?

Twitter Making Major Changes

Over the next couple of days your should begin to see some major changes taking place on Twitter. Titter will add photos and videos to the stream. This will closer approach some of the capabilities that Facebook has.

The rollout is suppose to take a couple of weeks to become fully implemented. But, some locals are expected to start seeing the changes as early as today.

Are your getting the new Twitter yet? What do you think of the change.

Huck Huckabee

Last month Twitter announced that Tweet number 20 billion had been sent.

Twitter Use Accelerating

Five billion of those tweets have come in the last two month. And ten billion of those tweets have come in the last five months. What does that tell you about Twitter?

With usage accelerating, it is becoming obvious that Twitter is becoming a widely accepted means of communication across the globe. Currently there are about 1140 tweets sent every second.

How many of those tweets are you responsible for?

I just finished reading a great article by Dan Zarella (click here). He talks about creating “Tweetable Moments” during a presentation. It provides some great strategies that a speaker can use to get his or her audience to tweet about something said in the presentation.

Who Is Your Audience?

Dan’s article focuses on presenters that are operating in front of a large group of people. I do this on occasion when I do my Internet seminars. Many people in business will have such opportunities, but not very often. But, remember, if you are in marketing to any extent, then you probably have daily audiences in various groups of one, two or three people. And there are opportunities in those situations to create “Tweetable moments.”

Keep It Short And Sweet

The tweet your audience is going to send out can only be 140 characters. Then you hope they mention your name to their followers. That way their followers many become your followers. Your audience  may also want to add their own short comment. So if I am going to get these benefits it will require a statement like “Here’s a neat item Huck Huckabee just told me about …” That takes up 51 characters. And remember they may want to leave a longer comment than that. So lets increase this number by 50% and say that we need our “Tweetable quote” to be under 60 characters. So that’s 75 characters for your senders adders and 60 characters for the quote. That is done in five characters under the limit.

Find Tweetable Content

Next, find a Tweetable statement related to you, your business or your industry. In this case I an looking up something on Twitter statistics. On Techcrunch.com there is a headline in a June 8th article that reads: “Costolo: Twitter Now Has 190 Million Users Tweeting 65 Million Times A Day.”

Create The Tweetable Quote

So, let’s create a ” Tweetable quote” from this information. This statement is made in 77 characters. Take “Costolo:” out and we’re down to 68. Edit the statement to “Twitter has 190 million users tweeting 65 million times a day” and you are under the 60 characters mentioned above. And now you have a Tweetable quote that you can share with your contacts during the day that some may repeat for you on Twitter.

Now, lets look at this situation again. The statement above has two very interesting items. This creates an opportunity for two Tweetable quotes and that will leave even more space for your audience to add their desired content.

So if your in the building supply business and you get that information about new housing starts jumping 40% next month, you’ll be able to create your Tweetable quote that your clients can share with their followers.

How do you create Tweetable moments?

Using SMS With Twitter

Twitter now allows you to follow someone on SMS if you don’t have a Twitter account. The tool is called “Fast Follow.” If you text “follow (username)” to Twitter’s shortcut of 40404, then you’ll receive that users updates in your text messaging.

When you are not signed in to Twitter, you can’t Tweet yourself. But some people may just want to receive messages from selected sources. And it may be a good way to send massages to customers and employees quickly and efficiently.

Do you think you will use Fast Follow? If so, how?

Huck

Twitter is implementing a tool that will suggest people for your to follow. The suggestions will be based on people you are following and who they are following. You can find it by going to the “Find People” link in the Twitter header and then click on the “Suggestions For You” tab. There you will find your list of suggestions.

Would You Pay Twitter To Suggest You?

A lot of businesses and individuals would like to get followers. I’m sure some are willing to pay for them. Is this a chance for Twitter to make some money?

A business that sells ballroom dance shoes would like ballroom dancers to receive their tweets. Twitter has the capability to scan tweets and see who tweets about dancing. This is the person that the shoe store would be interested in as having a follower.

Things are not working like this yet, but the opportunity is now close to presenting itself. Sounds like a win for the follower and the followee to me. What do you think?

Here’s what my suggestion screen looks like.

Twitter dangled a piece of cheese in front of some social media professionals recently with a setting called “Tweet Media.” It involves tools that will allow users to embed photos and videos into there Twitter messages.

On some accounts on July 26th, there were account settings options for the user to click that enabled Tweet Media.

Here’s what it looked like:

As of the writing of this article Twitter has removed the options from several of the accounts that temporarily had it. When Mashable Media asked Twitter about the option, they replied:

We’re constantly exploring features and settings. What you saw was a small test of a potential consumption setting for inline media. We show inline media on our own iPhone and Android apps.

Keep an eye out for some significant changes in Twitter’s presentation methods.