Twitter is an exceptional tool to engage community. I provided a quick Twitter Overview and this process walks you through signing up, adjusting your settings, selecting user name(s), avatars, meta data and importing your current contacts.
Being active and engaging in your community is vitally important. The same time you invest in your personal face to face relationships, you will need to invest in growing and enhancing your online relationships to be successful and built trust.
Overview of Twitter Basics
Setting up a free Twitter account is simple. Once set up you can move beyond the basics, and consider getting several accounts and avoid others from obtaining your brand, domain, product names, etc.
Check List:
Free Account
Select Name
Avatar/Photo
Global Location
Change Design Colors
Import Connections
Set Notices
Free Account.
Brief Biography
Free Account
Twitter names/ID’s are getting as popular as Domain names. The best way to protect your brand is to reserve your name now. Twitter allows you to register one user name per email. Have other email addresses available to this purpose.
Select Name
Keep User Names Consistent. Use your real name, company name, blog title or a brand name. Be consistent between networks. It is much easier to develop relationships, with your networks, when your community recognizes you across applications. If you are your own brand, then using your real name “tawnypress”, or a hybrid “tawny_press”, plays a significant roll in your Google ranking.
Brief Biography
This is over looked many times. Meta Data is important, very important on the web, but not usually people other than developers understand. The explanation is simple, Meta data is a “tag” or keyword, which allows information to be found through a search on the web.
Write your biography, as you would a websites meta tags, in fewer than 160 characters. Choice words that best describe you, both professionally and personally. People make observations based upon your bio and the look and feel, they express you and your company.
Avatar/Photo
Select a photo and use it consistently over all other social applications. Be easily recognizable. In most cases an avatar in a 100 x 100 pixel size, in a JPG, GIF or PNG format, works across most applications, but there are exceptions.
Note: A 100 x 100 pixel size photo appears pixilated in TweetDeck’s larger profile window. Using a larger size of 1000 x 1000 file size, not exceeding 700 k, works best overall.
Global Location
Under “Profile” there is a LOCATION field. Input your location in your profile; city, state or at minimum your country and state. This will help people locals people and business to locate you on Twitter when using search tools such as TwitterLocal or Twellow.
Change Design Colors
The color selector is greatly improved since I last covered this section. Select colors that match or compliment your brands identity and image.
To activate the color wheel, click on one of the fields; background, text, links, sidebar or sidebar border. Click on the color wheel to select the desired color. The color wheel will put the appropriate web colors in for you, or you can directly input your web hex color information.
Important note: until you SAVE CHANGES, your preferences will not be changed. If you do not like your selections, CANCEL and begin again.
Import Your Connections
You can import your contacts from Yahoo, Gmail or AOL. On your home bar, click on “Find People”.
Note: if you use Outlook, you can export your CSV file and import into one of these free services.
Set Notices
These settings allow you to control notification emails. You can set to have Twitter email you each time you have a new following or are send a Direct Message, by someone already in your network.
Mobile Settings
There are setting for having Twitter send to you though text messages. Twitter does not charge for this service, but your phone provider, depending on your plan may. There are many applications and services to view twitter on your phone, without using text messaging, depending on your phone and many are free.
There is even a mobile version of Twitter at http://mobile.twitter.com .
This was a brief overview of the Twitter Profile basics. Take Twitter for a test run. Take some time, follow a few people, listen to the real world in real time. You can also see current trending topics at tweetmeme.com .
Tags: Social Media, tweetmeme, twitter
