Twitter has the reputation for personal shares (“What I’m having for breakfast”), but that kind of Tweet is out of place for a business Twitter account. Here are a few tips to help you determine how personal you can be in your tweets.

Finding Your Brand

The first thing to think about is whether your brand is a personal brand or more of a corporate brand.

Your answer helps dictate your approach to how you use Twitter. To give a couple of examples from well-known airlines:

If Southwest Airlines or Virgin Atlantic were doing tweets, they’d want to do it in a very personal way because that is their corporate culture and their brand. Since they are known for going out of their way to connect with customers, that’s how they would tweet. However, if United Airlines or British Airways were too personal in their tweets, it just wouldn’t make sense as it goes against their brand; shareholders would start to doubt the management’s professionalism and their credibility would be damaged. Their brand is one of market dominance and corporate professionalism.

Take a look at your own brand and decide how you want customers to see you and how they expect you to behave.

It’s a Balance

The above examples are a good illustration of both extremes, but often times it’s not so cut and dry. In fact, most businesses will find themselves having to balance personal and professional tweets. If you’re a sole proprietor or a small company with fewer than 30 employees, then chances are you are going to have a lot of personal interactions with your customers. You’re not a faceless entity and your customers are likely going to want to get to know the human beings behind the computer screen and the tweets.

They also expect to be treated professionally and primarily want to relate to you in a business context. They want to know what’s going on with your services and your company, as well as how it relates to them. Therefore, you should not share with them what you had for breakfast, but it would be a good idea to share with them how excited your team is about your latest product launch.

Use your best judgment, using your brand and your customer relationship as a guideline. As a general rule, you will want to be personable while staying relevant. Avoid tweets that are clearly just personal, but also don’t come across as strictly commercial or corporate, unless that’s how your customers expect you to behave.

Twitter is becoming a huge asset in the business world. Both start-up businesses and Fortune 500 companies are recognizing the importance of using Twitter to stay in contact with customers. Here is how to eerffectively use Twitter for business:

Expand Your Reach

Having Twitter as an avenue to reach out to others is a powerful way to expand your reach. There are a lot of people who would click a Twitter “follow” button with much less hesitation than they would give out their email address. They want to follow your business, but they don’t necessarily want to be on another email list. In addition to people in your own network, you’ll also have access to all the people on Twitter. They will land on your website from direct searches, from retweets or from friends. It is a whole group of people you didn’t have access to before.

Market Research and Competition Research

Twitter is a great way to do market research and keep your eye on your competition to learn their latest developments. If your competitor has a Twitter account, you should be subscribed to it. In addition, pay attention to what your followers and the followers of everyone in your industry are saying. This will help you really keep your finger on the pulse of your industry.

Building Your Brand Actively

Rather than choosing a lot of logos and colors and sitting back hoping they will reflect positively on your brand, you can use Twitter to drive your brand actively. Using Twitter, you can regularly put out tweets about what is going on in your company, special promotions and other things that are relevant for your customers. You’ll also be able to handle customer complaints quickly. You’ll be able to resolve them, or at least mitigate the damage quickly if you are on Twitter.

Increasing Sales with Twitter

Twitter can be an incredibly powerful way to drive sales. Remember that your Twitter followers are loyal consumers who have signed up to follow your tweets because they like what your business is about.

Twitter gives business owners an opportunity to sell that simply isn’t available with email or Facebook. That opportunity comes from the frequency of contact.

It is frowned upon to email a consumer several times a week. With Twitter, however, you can tweet several times a day without breaking consumer trust. Things like a countdown to a product launch, reminders about a freebie giveaway, or up-to-the-minute updates on a contest would never be acceptable by email, but are welcomed on Twitter.

Using Twitter for business can make a big difference on your brand, your customer relationships and your bottom line.

Although they have not yet officially released a paid Twitter account, Twitter’s founder has confirmed that they are planning to release such an account with advanced features. These features are optional, but will give a person or business who uses Twitter a leg up on their competitors. What are some of the top Twitter features that are worth paying for?

Scheduled Tweets

Let’s say you have a product launch and need to send out updates every two hours. It’s quite a bit of hassle to have to log on every two hours to post a new tweet. Instead, being able to schedule your tweets ahead of time is one of the most requested features for Twitter.

Analytics

How many people have seen your Facebook page? What percentage of people is turning into followers?

When you post a link on your Twitter, how many people actually click on the link? How many people saw it? For the average user, the answers to these questions aren’t important. For a business owner, however, they’re crucial. Currently you can get some of this data by using a redirect for your link, but having analytics on your Twitter account is certainly a feature worth paying for.

Multiple User Accounts

If you run a business with several employees and want to give all your employees the ability to tweet, without necessarily giving administrative privileges to all employees is another common feature request for business accounts.

Longer Tweets

Since Twitter allows tweets to be no longer than 140 characters, it is sometimes difficult trying to condense a long tweet into fewer words.  A new feature that many will consider worth paying for is slightly longer tweets.

No Restrictions on API for Applications

If you have an application that allows you to read your Twitter feed and interact with your Twitter account, it does so through what is called API calls, which are commands and data that go back and forth between a Twitter application and Twitter.

A basic Twitter account has a limited number of API calls per hour, and if you go over the limit, you simply can’t use your application until the hour is up. This could be problematic for a business account, especially if you’re an advanced user. That’s also true of applications that use Twitter to mine data. The limited API makes it difficult to gather a lot of data at once. Having unlimited API access is a Twitter feature that advanced business users would be glad to pay for.

These are some of the many top Twitter features that are worth paying for. Although Twitter hasn’t released many details yet, it is suspected that there will be two levels of paid accounts: A lower tier level with of about $20 monthly targeted at power users and small businesses, and an upper tier level in the hundreds of dollars monthly targeted at corporations and larger businesses.

Twitter can seem both foreign and intimidating. It has its own terminology (Tweets, Retweets, Followers, Feeds) and just seems less intuitive than email, but it really just takes an hour or so to learn your way around. Here are a few simple tips for getting started with Twitter:

Begin Slowly

You don’t need to be a Twitter wiz from the outset. In fact, if you try out the system and don’t enjoy using it, there’s no reason you need to continue. So just give it a try with no pressure. You don’t need to get good at it quickly. Just give yourself time to get acquainted with the system.

Start with Your Friends

When you first sign up for Twitter, the system will allow you to determine which of your friends are already on Twitter. It can do this by importing your contact list from your email or your Facebook account. Begin by reading through your Twitter feed, which is the scrolling list of most recent tweets. At first, this will just consist of your own friends. If you want to see more from a certain person, just click on their name to see their individual feed.

Getting Followers

Reading other people’s feeds is half the Twitter experience. Eventually, you will want your own followers and your own tweets. Again, take it slowly. Don’t feel as though you need to get many followers all at once. In fact, unless you’re deliberately trying to get followers, your followers will mostly be your close friends. Once you’ve gotten the hang of reading tweets and Twitter feeds, then you might want to invite your list of friends to follow you and your tweets. Once you’ve invited your friends, wait a couple days for them to respond.

Putting Out Your First Tweets

What you should tweet depends on what you want to tweet about.

If your Twitter is primarily people who are close to you and you want to stay in touch with your life, then tweet about whatever is going on in your life. On the other hand, if your Twitter has a purpose, for example, if it’s for a project, then send out tweets whenever you have something that’s relevant to the topic to say.

You now know the basics of how to follow your friends, read tweets, read your Twitter feeds, get a few followers and send out a tweet. The rest is up to you. Learning Twitter can take anywhere from an hour or so to a few days.

There are many ways to use Twitter: just for fun, for a project or even for business. The most important thing is that you start slowly. Remember, there’s no pressure – learn at your own pace.

Tips for Tweeting As Part of Your Daily Business Routine 3

Once you’re all set up, simply login to your Twitter page, or open up your Twhirl software and start sending messages.

Just as with any social networking site such as forums or message boards, Twitter can easily take big chunks of your time if not monitored carefully. This is one reason it would be wise to devote a set amount of time per day to network with it.

A good starting point would be around 15 minutes each day, around the same time/s every day.  You can easily plan this with your morning email check and cup of coffee, around lunch time, and/or at the end of the day.

The frequency is up to you, but since it is only 140 characters, you can easily tweet 3 times a day if you have something worthwhile to say.

Anytime something interesting is going on in your business, whether it’s a site change, a product launch or even a special post to your blog, use Twitter to let your followers know.

Make sure your tweets are well-crafted—you might want to draft them in Word first to make sure there are no misspellings, and that your tweet is the right length (you can go to Tools, Word Count, and see the number of characters with spaces if you are not sure.

You might also want to keep this Word file handy so you can see your tweets all in one place and copy and paste essential information quickly and easily, like your URL.

As with any marketing tool, don’t just bombard Twitter with your links. Be personable and establish your expertise in your niche. Be friendly and observant to others as well, commenting where appropriate, and you’ll go far with Twitter.

You may not see results from your twittering efforts immediately, but the important thing is to begin to get your name recognized and be a regular contributor.

The more you tweet, and incorporate the service into your daily business routine, the more recognized you’ll become. People will want to know what’s going on with you and your business, and in time, you’ll be linked to over and over again by other users.

Twitter can be a powerful marketing tool to help your business grow, with only a bit of time and effort, but only if you use it judiciously. And only if you remember that it is just one of many social networking and Web 2.0 tools with marketing potential to help you grow your business or website and take it to the next level.