Microbusiness Mentor

Twitter is a power tool to help you share what your business is about or offers and a way to connect in real time with prospects and customers of your business.

Decide what you want to use as your Twitter username, which usually is preceded by the symbol @, for example, my twitter username is @janechin.

Your username is not a trivial matter when you’re looking to leverage Twitter as a business tool: this is the “face” that others see.

If your presence is an integral part of a business brand (a reason why I tweet with my real name) or if your name IS a business brand, use your real name as the username; otherwise, use your company name or product name as the username.

At the beginning, you may worry about how many followers you have and stare ruefully at your following of “0″.

For business owners, leveraging Twitter and any social media as your marketing or PR strategy is more dependent on what happens AS A RESULT OF gaining a new follower than simply gaining followers,

…unless your end goal is to make this a game of getting a million followers like some Hollywood celebs. Ask yourself why you’re twittering to begin with – and how you want the time you spend on Twitter to translate into real business returns.

Personally, I’d rather have 50 followers whose engagement gives me new business ideas or real business, than 50,000 followers who purely play the “I follow you, you follow me” numbers game and don’t care less what I offer.

(that said, if those 50,000 people don’t mind promotional tweets that businesses broadcast OR if I’m looking to build broad reach as part of my thought leadership/influencing strategy, then I’m perfectly agreeable to obsessing about the number of followers I have.)

You should see your activity as literally building your business brand and presence one tweet at a time.

Pay attention to what you tweet and retweet (when you share other people’s tweets). What you retweet says a lot about what you find interesting and valuable, and further gives your followers insight about you as a person or company. I like retweeting thought provoking questions, blog entries I find inspiring, or leadership quotes I like.

Tweeting frequency can be a hot debate, some may recommend that you tweet as often as possible every single day. I do not have a high daily tweeting “average” because I choose to share what I find interesting or inspiring, or use Twitter to ask questions about different topics. I have a policy to follow only those people whose tweets I find intriguing and useful, and I do go through my list and periodically unfollow those whose interests have diverged from mine to make room for new people I’d like to add.

I recommend that you focus more on the “connecting” than on any “broadcasting” or “promoting”.

You’re given only 140 characters per Twitter entry or “tweet”. This means you can turn people off with blatant promotion faster than ever. Tweet wisely!