How to set up Twitter for your business

If you haven’t yet established a presence for your business on Twitter, it’s time to do it. And not only for organic marketing reasons: since early 2011, Google compiles and analyzes Twitter data to influence its search results.

Here are the nuts and bolts of getting your company set up on Twitter:

Employees should set up individual accounts associated with the company.

When setting up Twitter accounts for your business, I suggest adding the same background that is used on your company website, in order to maintain corporate design.

Go to your company website and right-click “View Background Image.”

Right-click on the image “Save Image As….”

Save the image on your computer with a name that has keyword relevance to your business – use dashes not underscores – e.g., “expert-concrete-cutting.png”.

Log into your Twitter account. Go to your profile and click “Edit profile.”

Click the “Design” tab.

Click “Change background image.”

Click “Browse” and upload the image file that you previously saved on your computer (our example: expert-concrete-cutting.png).

Put a checkmark in the “tile background” box.

You may not see the change immediately. Twitter has had some problems rendering custom backgrounds. It will usually appear within 24 hours.

The next step is to install the Twitter app on your smart phone and/or tablet device. This will allow you to tweet while you’re on the go.

You can visit the App Store on your iPhone and install the app – or see this page and click on your device:
http://twitter.com/?lang=en&logged_out=1#!/download

Examples of possible tweets. Think of them as headlines. You are limited to 140 characters:

“Just spent 10 minutes chatting with Bill Gates at the Esri conference. Soft where? #ESRIUC”

“Google to roll out brainscanner app. Beta version will blow your mind! #SXSWi”

The hashtag is used to provide context and let other Twitter users find your tweet. So if you’re tweeting from a conference, you should always include the hashtag for the event. You can find this by searching the full name of the event in Twitter and then checking tweets for the predominant hashtag. Hashtags are organic and not officially stipulated by anyone.

In my example…
#ESRIUC is ESRI User Conference.
#SXSWi is South By Southwest Interactive.

It’s also possible to embed links in your tweets. For example, when you roll out a new product or service, you can tweet a link to that page. In order to economize character usage, you can use bitly.com to shorten the URL.

For example, this link http://twitter.com/?lang=en&logged_out=1#!/download

shortened at bitly.com, becomes http://bit.ly/mx40Qq

The @ symbol is used to direct your tweet at a particular user when a tweet conversation is taking place. For example, if you want to direct a tweet to us, you would include “@hardyintl” in the tweet.

Welcome to Twitter. Not only does the platform provide you an opportunity to present your business to the world, it also gives you up-to-the-minute news on your specific area of interest. Search: #whatyourinterestedin, and enjoy the feed.