Twitter for Dummies (32 page)

Surround yourself with successful people.
We don’t mean just others in your profession or field who are more successful than you! We also mean people in other fields or areas of creativity that inspire you. You can start to find them by finding out which of your real-world contacts in the industry are on Twitter or by doing a few Twitter searches to find like-minded people while you build your network.

Take it offline.
Take the connections that you make on Twitter and organize events and get-togethers that bring the experience offline. You can also find out about other members’ tweetups that are relevant to your business. In creative industries, the talent is what counts, and so real-world connections can really lead to new opportunities, fan segments, and opportunities to build your loyal fan base.

Share your content.
You don’t have to give away all your hard work, but put your music, art, videos, or other work out there for people to sample and play with. Start a Blip.fm (
http://blip.fm
) channel, upload a short video to YouTube, offer free mp3s on your Web site, or set up a page that features a few Creative Commons–licensed photos. Whatever you do, give people a way to take a look or have a listen so that they can get to know you and what you make.

Creative Commons (
http://creativecommons.org
) is an organization that makes it easy for people to license their work so that they retain their copyright but allow it to be shared. For more information on how Creative Commons works, go to
http://creativecommons.org/about
.

Tweet on the go.
Give your fans and potential fans a look backstage, in the van, behind the canvas, on tour, or behind the lens. Take them with you by tweeting while you travel with your music, art, film, or other creative medium. Also, let them know where you are! Many fellow Twitter users would love to hang out with you if you happen to be in town.

Engage your fan base.
Don’t just post static links to content or schedule changes! Talk to your fans and respond to them through Twitter. They probably want to ask you about the thoughts behind your work, your experiences, and you. Let them. Answer them. Engage them in good conversation, and watch as they spread the word about your work to their friends and followers.

Be yourself.
Put a good face forward, yes, but don’t try too hard to project a persona that really isn’t authentically you. Twitter is a medium that rewards authenticity, candor, and transparency. Try too hard to put your best face forward, and you may lose yourself and stop being genuine. Twitter people notice if you aren’t being real. Don’t worry about impressing people — just do what you do and be yourself, and the fans will follow.

For the most up-to-date examples of how musicians (
http://wefollow.com/tag/music
), TV personalities (
http://wefollow.com/tag/tv
), actors (
http://wefollow.com/tag/actor
), comedians (
http://wefollow.com/tag/comedy
), and other celebrities (
http://wefollow.com/tag/celebrity
) are using Twitter, check out some of the top most-followed individuals in each category on user-generated Twitter directory We Follow. For more in-depth reading on how musicians can use Twitter, see (
http://pistachioconsulting.com/musicians-guide-to-rocking-twitter
).

Sharing Company Updates

If you have a new or growing company that you want to introduce to the world through Twitter, start a separate account for the company, just as Laura did with
@oneforty
. You may find balancing traditional corporate professionalism with the level of transparency that Twitter users have come to expect to be a little tricky sometimes, so keep these guidelines in mind when you start your new account:

Provide value to the Twitter community.
Your company account can become a source of news, solutions, ideas, entertainment, or information that’s more than just a series of links to products and services. Educate your Twitter followers. Reach out to people whom you can genuinely and unselfishly help. You can even offer sales incentives for products, in the way that
@DellOutlet
does, as long as what you offer has genuine value. Establish your company’s leadership in providing ideas, solutions, and innovation.

Attach a real-world face to the account.
If you need to use a company logo as the avatar because of internal regulations or because multiple people are maintaining the account, make sure to list the names of the actual people who are tweeting in the Bio section of your business’s Twitter profile, and consider signing each tweet with the author’s initials. This approach lets your followers become familiar with who’s behind the company voice and it makes them feel more engaged. People like to talk to other people, not brands.

Don’t spam.
Don’t flood the Twitter feed with self-promotional links or product information that don’t deliver genuine value to readers. Whether self-promotional or not, you never want to clog up peoples’ Twitter streams with irrelevant information. You might not talk about your cat or your marriage on a company account, but you can still make it personal. Profile an employee, talk about milestones for employees, or talk about what’s going on in your office. You can even hold tweetups at your office and invite your followers to stop by, like Boston’s NPR news station WBUR (
@WBUR)
does. This approach gives people a peek at what makes your company run.

Before tweeting in earnest for your company, it’s a good idea to openly discuss your plans to demonstrate that you’re taking a productive, innovative approach and to prevent any misguided fears that twittering means you will somehow suddenly start to leak sensitive company information or otherwise break reasonable corporate policies. As with any public communications platform, you do need to consider just how much you can say about what goes on inside your business. Transparency is key, but you don’t want to disclose industry secrets in a public forum. Every company has a different style. It helps to have a good plan in place and make sure that the employees assigned to the company Twitter account are trustworthy and have solid judgment.

Building Community

Community-building sometimes suffers from a kum-ba-ya perception that devalues the importance of using tools such as Twitter to connect with people. But building a truly engaged community is extremely valuable.

Apple is an example of a company that benefits tremendously from its engaged community in terms of promotion, sales, and even customer support administered from one Apple fan directly to others. Apple built its community by building great products people get passionate about, not by worrying about any particular tools. So as you approach the Twitter opportunity, remember how powerful and engaged community can be and remember what people actually engage around — the things they really and truly care about.

At its best, the community concept of sharing and connecting can help you spread a positive image and good comments about your company; done wrong, it can veer into feel-good, self-help banter that’s ultimately empty. Again, don’t fuss too much about Twitter as a tool. Think more strategically about the community and what they care about and engage them with substance and real contributions.

Building a community is not necessarily the same as building a network:

Network:
Your network is there for you and your business, a kind of foundation for concrete professional growth.

Community:
Building a community means inspiring the people who follow you on Twitter to embrace your brand and create a feeling of solidarity around your business, service, staff, or product.

With a community, you can build a loyal corps of evangelists: people who are passionate about your brand, even though they have no professional or financial stake in the company. If you can engender the community feeling through your use of Twitter and how you interact with your customers, your customers begin to feel emotionally invested in your success online.

You can see this community feeling with Zappos. The Twitter users who follow the shoe retailer are so dedicated that they act like they’re legitimately invested in the brand’s success. Zappos fosters this effect by staying on top of what people on Twitter are saying about them, or about shoes in general, through the use of monitoring tools. Then they jump in with help, as needed. If you tweet about having trouble finding any kind of shoe, for example, you can expect a Zappos employee to send you a direct message (DM) or @reply in less than a day that includes links to the proper pages on the Zappos site. Plus, Zappos has spent so much time building a strong community that Twitter members who don’t even work for Zappos will routinely pass along information they see or hear and will even reach out on behalf of the company and connect potential customers with Zappos.com.

You can also see the community around less popular products, such as Comcast’s cable offerings. Even while people express frustration about their cable service, members of their Twitter network still point them to
@Comcastcares
to find help.

Community is also a huge aspect of many musicians’ and artists’ Twitter experiences, such as Imogen Heap (
@ImogenHeap
) and John Mayer (
@johncmayer
). Heap uses Twitter to interact more directly with her fan base, which increases the loyalty of her listeners, who have come to see a more human side of her and feel like they’ve even come to know her. If someone tweets something about Heap that her Twitter followers don’t like, you can watch the community leap to her defense. At the same time, tweets from her Twitter community usually reflect the tone of her own calm tweets, remaining mellow and not shrill.

Musicians, actors and other celebrities are really personality-based businesses, and bringing forth those personalities on Twitter by asking questions and sharing parts of their lives cements a valuable engagement between the artist and fans.

You can build community through

Genuine interaction

Asking questions

Honesty

Transparency

Following people back who follow you

Not over-automating

Being more than a link list

Providing value

Conducting Research

Twitter is an excellent tool for crowd-sourcing and focus-group research. You can easily get the answers you seek after you establish a relationship with your followers that encourages participation, conversation, and sharing. The real challenge is finding reliable methods to extract and analyze the data: Twitter is still a very new medium, and analytics tools associated with it aren’t yet that advanced. Larger corporations are diving in to conduct their own research and build their own tools that can make sense of the tremendous amount of data being generated on Twitter all the time.

If you’re willing to experiment with different ways to watch the Twitter stream, you can collect
passive
data
(what people happen to be mentioning), do
active research
(asking questions and conduction polls), and even engage actual focus groups and ad-hoc communities in live events.

As you build your network and start gaining more followers on Twitter, it becomes a very useful tool for informal conversational research. If you ask a really good question and send it into the world with a
#hashtag
to make the answers easier to find, you can even do research with a very small following, because the tag attracts curious bystanders who may later become new followers. As you ask questions, you can use any number of polling tools or even a simple manually generated tracking system (such as a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet) to collect the answers and data that you receive.

Twitter can be thought of as a global, human-powered, mobile phone-enabled sensing and signaling network. What Twitter knows about the world is pretty incredible, and once businesses understand how to work with that information, it can contribute toward closing some pretty important gaps in our economy between supply and demand.