Is Twitter Any Good? Yes And No. Mostly Yes

The beauty of Twitter is that you meet a million people you wouldn’t otherwise.

Here’s how to get started: You can start with using search.twitter.com see what people are talking about that relates to your industry. See what they’re linking to and mentioning. This can lead you in the right direction. If you start a dialogue or start to follow someone then you can weigh in on topics and offer your expertise.  You can slowly build your followers using your other social media tools, especially your blog. You can get rich content from followers including links, commentary, and a view on what your group is saying to each other and others.

To be fair, some of what is on Twitter is totally useless- you really don’t need to be told if someone is brushing their teeth or what time they are going to bed; but no form of interaction is 100% valuable. You just need to balance what matters and what doesn’t. According to Business Insider, Twitter is moving towards being able to accurately determine where the tweets will be coming from. With location tracking, the quality of targeted marketing expands exponentially and allows for easier transitions to offline meetings as well.

With Twitter you can send microblogs from the web or your cellphone through text messaging. People can follow their updates, and people can discover their Twitter account through keyword searches on Twitter.

Twitter DON’Ts: There are several things you should avoid doing on Twitter because it is generally frowned upon by the community:

1. exploiting new client news

2. straight out traditional pitching

3. sending random things specifically to people or journalists you don’t know

Remember that even if you want to promote your business you don’t want to be a Twitter spammer just pushing your own stuff. Show that you can be part of the community.

How to Use Social Media

Social media conversations are powered by Blogs, microblogs, online chats, rss feeds ( Really Simple Syndication- an easy distribution method to organize headlines and notices for easy reading) – especially for websites whose content changes on an unpredictable schedule- it means you don’t have to check each and every site you are interested in for new content- major time and tedium, the feed sends it to you. It also eliminates the spam problem, widgets ( which is a fancy word for tools or content that you can add, arrange, and remove from the sidebars or layout of your blog). They make it easy to customize the content of your sidebar, social networks, podcasts, video and photo sharing sites. Using Social media combined with industrial media ( newspapers, print, television, radio is the preferred method of gaining an audience) Don’t rely on social media alone to help your business flourish.