We’re continuing on in the social media series, and talking about Twitter today (check out last week’s post for information on using Facebook for business). Twitter has a simple and yet unique method that only allows 140 characters per post. It started as a great way to inform friends and family of your whereabouts, and has evolved into a community of diverse people: businessmen, teens, artists, non-profits, etc. Twitter doesn’t limit you on anything but characters; you can use it for personal relations, for business, for networking or anything you like. Check out our tips on how to maintain a twitter profile for your business in order to further your reach and maximize your potential.

Twitter, just like Facebook, has some pretty awesome stats:

• In January 2010, twitter.com had nearly 75,000,000 visitors
• Compete.com puts them at the 12th largest site in the world
• 50 million tweets are sent per day
• Since 2009, tweets have gone up by 1,400%

Twitter has been called one of the most misunderstood social media sites. Are you supposed to post about personal updates, updates for your company, links to blog posts? The beauty of Twitter is that you can do anything you want with it. Say what you want and interact with people how you want to.

Steps to Twitter Success

1. Create a profile: Creating a profile is super quick and easy. Make sure to choose a relevant username (your company is your best bet) and add information about your company that is short (space is limited) but informative. Quick tip, don’t add www to your web address, only a certain amount of characters are shown on your twitter page and you don’t want to waste space with www.

2. Customize your space: Get a custom twitter background, something to match your company’s branding would be great. Including relevant contact information in the background is a great thing to add like links to other social media profiles, phone, email, etc.

3. Plan your posts: Just like Facebook (and any social media site), it’s important to come up with a plan for posting. Decide who will post, how often, and what type of posts you’ll create. Keep it consistent and post fairly often, at least once a week if not once a day in order to keep your name out there and in front of your colleagues and potential customers.

4. Find a Twitter client: There are TONS of twitter clients out there that help to maximize your Twitter experience by tracking and analyzing your tweets. I recommend Hootsuite, it’s simple to setup and you can connect your Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn profiles. You can do all the normal Twitter stuff on there as well as track your links to see how many people have clicked through to them and schedule tweets in the future (which is really handy for vacation time).

5. Add value for your followers: Reward your followers by giving them something of value. Offer discounts, valuable resources, insider tips on your industry, or anything that would benefit them by being connected to you. It’s important to connect to people and interact with them through Twitter, but it’s great to give back as well.

6. Search: One of the greatest things about Twitter is that you can search for relevant information. Someone is always looking for someone else to complete something for them and finding them is very easy. Go to search.twitter.com and you can type in “looking for designer” or “need a designer” and tons of results pop up. Contact those people and all of sudden you have a new potential customer that actually needs what you’re selling. You can add these searches to Hootsuite and stay updated as well.

Many of the steps to success with any social media platform are the same: keep it professional and classy, but informative and useful for your users. Your methods to post can be the same for Facebook and Twitter, but I do recommend you post different things in each place. That way users will find more value in following you in multiple places. Offer discounts or coupons on Facebook, and then resources and relevant articles on Twitter. Linking to them on each profile is fine, but don’t repeat posts on both unless it’s really important and necessary like an upcoming event or exciting company news.

Get started on Twitter and you’ll see how easy it is to use and how beneficial it can really be! We’d love to hear about your Twitter success stories and how you use it to benefit your business.