How to Get Started on Twitter

Posted by Nathan in Social Strategy, Twitter on 07 2nd, 2009 | View Comments

OK, so you finally decided you need to get your personal or business brand up and running on Twitter, but you don’t know what to do next. I’ll admit, learning Twitter can be a difficult task at first, because you aren’t sure why anyone would follow you and why you should follow anyone else.

At first, you’ll probably think you should just invite family and friends, but that is probably not the best strategy. Although friends and family will help, you shouldn’t focus on them for branding efforts.

Instead, you need to find your future customers and put yourself in front of them. This includes using Twitter search, sites like Twitter Grader, and Twitter Counter to find other like minded individuals. Use these power users to build a basic following and then work to provide solid content via video and blogging so that you have something to share.

A pitch is not something that most people want to talk about, so spend more time talking about your niche and yourself than your pitch. Let people get to know you and don’t be afraid to get slightly personal. Give away content and information to establish yourself as an authority, which in turn will help you get coverage via RT’s (ReTweets) and @’s (replies). It only takes a base of 500-2000 people before your efforts will start to multiply on their own.

Another place you’ll need to do some work is your profile. Many people look past the important steps of setting up a power user’s profile, but if you really want to gain traction in your niche you’ll need to set up your account first. Here’s what you need to do:

Go to http://freetwitterdesigner.com and set up a background image for your profile. Make sure to include any relevant information about yourself that you can and also any profile or blog links that will fit. It certainly wouldn’t hurt to include a phone number, tag line, or address to give yourself some credibility. Depending on yor niche, you might want to include some product images as well.
Replace the default image with a good and professional picture of yourself. It doesn’t have to be formal, but it should represent you and your brand. People with default profile images are generally ignored, and that is certainly not the way you want to be treated. This is absoutely a must.
Create a well thought out bio and include as much about yourself as possible. Make it compelling, original, and catchy. Don’t lie or hype yourself up…just be real. This is where a lot of people go wrong. Also, don’t sound like a commercial, talk about what makes you different, don’t focus on the product.

Once you’ve got your profile set up, you can then move on to using the right methodology and techniques to find people in your niche to follow and then build a list from there. There are several ways to do this, but I prefer the bot-free method, which I talk about in my Twitter course called Twitter Rockstar.

Check out http://Twitip.com as well to stay up to date on Twitter trends and techniques.

There are a lot of people that use Twitter wrong right off the bat, but if you follow these 3 steps first you’ll be in better shape than most.

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