Raving Twitter accounts…

Could you have more than one Twitter account?

In this key step, step 3, we are going to consider how many Twitter accounts your specific areas of business could benefit from.

Did you read the lesson on Personalisation?

Target your followers

It is possible to target specific groups of followers. However, anyone can see what you say or indeed what you have said, you cannot easily stop people from seeing your tweets, although you can block certain followers. Essentially, though, Twitter and your tweets are open to all, for everyone to read.

Let me introduce a concept that everyone shoudl consider, even though it may not seem immediately applicable to one person enterprises. Imagine if you will that several people were working together and each had their own twitter accounts. One person was sales, another was service, another PR and another the CEO each would have a different group and indeed a different message to communicate. With this understanding, it gives some pretty good reasons as to why you might want to consider creating and managing several Twitter accounts. Now if you are time poor, this is not necessarily the best for you, but there are systems for automation and indeed the Weboptimiser team provide a Twitter Followers service to help.

Imagine all the people…

If you imagine that your first twitter account would reach a certain circle of followers, your colleagues may have their own Twitter accounts and they would each have a different circle of followers. Whilst the circles might overlap, generally it could be expected that your group of followers would be different from each of your colleagues.

So, if you have something to announce that was important, you would get that message out to your followers easily. You would hope that some of your followers would forward your message to others. You would also ask your colleague to forward that message out their followers and as a result your message would go out to several groups of people.

It does not always work in practice! Your colleageus may not send the message, they may edit and misinterpret, your colleague may be away, have other things to say, or it may go out at a different time. Whatever the problem, the problems are beyond your control. That may be ok, but imagine if you had set up multiple accounts yourself. You could get your message out to the followers of each account and you would be in total control.

We would see a model where it was not so much one to many, but few to many. Well, if you do not work for a large company or if you do not have lots of similarly minded friends or indeed if your market is very niche and could be subdivided relatively easily then, there is nothing to stop you from opening multiple accounts. Of course you have to make sure that you are not spamming or continuously and automatically retweeting sales messages, as if you do that you could find one or all your accounts being removed.

Competitive edge…

If you run a small business or department, having multiple accounts could make a big difference to your competitiveness.

Starting off having them yourself would give you complete control. Not only that, there are still some ‘landgrab’ opportunities available. For instance, look at all the domains (web site names) that your competitors have in your market, some are pretty clear as to what they are – is there a category name out there that has not been employed that you could grab? Could you open an account for each of your main product or service areas? For sales, for service, for supplies, spares or even just to communicate hot tips?

Key word analysis could help. Keyword analysis is really quite simple nowadays, at least for this exercise. Search for Google Keywords and type in the key words that focus on your business area. You will be presented with a list of words that always give me inspiration.

We would not advocate that you claim your competitor names, as that would be mean, but you should grab your own name, and your colleagues names, your business name – just make sure the business owner and your colleageus get the names you grab!

You could go country by country too or even by city, county or state – it just depends how local your business is.

So in summary there are plenty of twitter names that you can have and perhaps should secure for your own business safety. There are millions of followers to be had too and the numbers look set to grow. So this is the first real business application of twitter – to build a list and secure your marketing positions. These are basics – and at no cost – can you afford not to?

How to Twitter: How to Tweet – by video

To make life even easier for you I have prepared a video for you that you can watch on line. As you see me open an account, you will hear me talk through the process the variables and all the additional information that could be useful, that we have not written out here.

Watch my Twitter Video

You will find a few additional ideas about setting up your account, you will see how I import an additional list from my email accounts. I show you how to upload a picture, set your email notices, and set up the time, link to your website and you can watch me insert my bio. Then I show you how to find people to follow and who knows some might follow me back!

That’s it for now

We hope you have found this edition interesting. The best thing you can do now is to take action – go ahead – and follow us… @weboptimiser

Next up: the art of the Tweet