A guide for people new to using Twitter

I’ve been asked to introduce our company, all 6 markets, to how to use Twitter. A few people have signed up on their own, but for everyone it’s got to start at square one. This is my outline, which I plan to fill in with slides. What do you think?

1hr total w/slides tbd

Why social media is important and useful

  • Why numbers are not important, involvement is

Who’s on twitter? A few examples per city.

Terminology and functions

  • Using @
  • @ to your account to see who is talking about/with you
  • Direct messages
  • # (in general and per market popular ones to note)
  • RT
  • Topic trending
  • Favorites
  • Each tweet is a url, forever, and searchable

Search.twitter.com

  • to find mentions of site or book name
  • to find other merchants, city specific events
  • to find people

More ways of finding people to follow

  • Using “Find People” to search for names
  • Using email contact lists
  • Seeing who other users follow and talk to
  • Search # keywords for your city or topic

Gaining followers

  • (I’ve already uploaded their work contact lists and the newsletter lists to an alias email to find people on Twitter per market)
  • Responding to new followers with a hello message and “follow us on facebook [link]“
  • What to do about spam accounts and baiting

Content

  • sales at local stores
  • events
  • exclusive or breaking information
  • Importance of looking like a human–occasional off topic tweets
  • Using Bud Url or Bit.ly to shrink links

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3 Responses to “A guide for people new to using Twitter”

  1. Patrick says:

    If you were good you could do it in 140 characters or less. Anyway an hour is too long, you should be able to get the idea in half that.

  2. Carissa says:

    True about the hour, but with time for questions…best to schedule a solid hour?

  3. Celeste says:

    I’d say that services they can use to help manage their twitter account(s), keep track of topics/conversations/feedback are useful. For example: tweetgrid, backtype/convotrack, tweetlater, etc.

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