Twitter for Business – My First 30 Days

When Twitter first came out, I didn’t understand it.  What possible message could a person convey in 140 characters?  Plenty it seems.  Twitter is now one of those necessary tools for web marketing.

I was first really exposed to Twitter about a year ago when a blogger friend stayed for a visit.  He used it in relation to his blog.  That’s when I began to see the possibilities.

Mortgage rate notification seemed to be a good application for Twitter.  They constantly change and can sometimes change multiple times in a day.  That was my thought.  Even though I’m not currently blogging about mortgages or real estate, I decided to give it a try.

First of all, it’s pretty easy to set up and I can link to this blog from it.  Cool, an SEO application!  So then I picked some people to follow.  From Facebook I knew certain friends were using Twitter, so I started following them.  I picked Pat because he’s been using it for a while.  I also picked Jay to keep me in the real estate loop.  Then I made a couple selections for my own personal learning;  Matt and Mark.  That’s how I started.

Oh, I also added my Twitter feed to this site.  A few days later, I connected my Facebook business page to Twitter, so I only have to type one message to get it across to four networks – this blog, my Twitter followers, my FB business fans and my FB friends.

Within a few hours people were following me.  Sure some of them were scammers/spammers, but the ones that looked interesting, I followed back.  Twitter actually is pretty aggressive in deleting scammers, so I saw my follower list decrease a couple times, but it quickly grew again.  I learned this from following Danny.

That was the other thing.  I learned so much in the last month, just by following people!  Every interesting tweet led to a bookmark of their blog/article and a follow on my part.  In 30 days my follow list grew from four to nearly forty.  My follower list grew from 0 to 44.  That’s faster than my blog grew in the same amount of time!

I also learned that I don’t know very much about Twitter.  I guess there are a bunch of tools out there to filter and manage other people’s tweets.  Right now I just go through once a day and skim what other people have written.  Of course, I see some of them through Facebook, but I don’t want to friend everyone I follow on Twitter.

At the end of 30 days I have learned a lot about Twitter -

• Twitter is a great place to make connections you won’t be able to make from Facebook or your website.  I can follow people like Matt, Mark and Danny on Twitter, where on Facebook I don’t think my friend request would be accepted.  A smart marketer will try to convert Twitter followers to their FB business page, blog, website or mailing list.
• Putting your Twitter feed on your blog allows for additional SEO opportunities, especially if you use a different title.  I can use one title for my post and another title for my tweet and get Google to recognize both of them!
• I need to get some sort of Twitter management tool going so I can see tweets in real time.  I missed out on a pair of free Utah Jazz tickets yesterday because I didn’t.  Who knows what else I’m missing out on?

Overall, Twitter has far exceeded my expectations after using it for 30 days.  I think there are a lot of great ways to use it for business and I’m going to talk about a few of my ideas in my next couple of posts.

What has been your experience with Twitter?  What kind of business applications do you think it has?  Leave a comment to let me know.