Taming the Twitter Beast: 8 Steps for Business Owners

Most small business owners tell me they don’t have enough time in their schedules for social media like twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Although I agree that social media can be time consuming and even a bit overwhelming at times, there are ways to engage and explore the benefits without losing precious hours out of the day.

For example, if you are wanting to explore twitter, here is a basic game plan for keeping it useful.

1. Sign up. This should only take you a minute or two. Click on www.twitter.com, plug in your name, a screen name, an email and a password and voila! You are raring to go.
2. Once signed up, give some thought into who is having the types of conversations that interest you as a business owner. For example, if you are a financial planner, you would want to tap into people who are talking finance or who require information on finances.
3. Find people to follow. Good places to start finding people include sites such as www.tweetscan.com or
   www.twellow.com. Don’t worry about coming up with an exhaustive list right from the start, at this point, you are just interested in getting started.
4. Start following a few knowledgeable people and check out who they are following that might share similar interests.
5. If someone starts following you, check out their bio and see if they share your interests. If they don’t, you are under no obligation to follow them back.
6. Sit back, listen, ask questions, give advice and post interesting links to articles that pertain to your business.
7. Although many people post on a variety of topics, if you find you have followed someone who posts endless tweets on what they ate for dinner but nothing on your area of interest, don’t hesitate to unfollow them.
8. Although you will probably find relationship building easier if you are interacting at a consistent rate, there is no requirement to be active on an hourly or on call basis. So don’t be a slave to your twitter account. Give it the time you can – if that means checking your account once a day, then check it once a day.

Hopefully these steps will help you tame the twitter beast and keep you focused on what is most important to your business.