Total Users 190m
Lead User Age Group 63% 18–24 Year Olds
Gender Split 59% Females
Geo Majority 28.6% USA
Here is our business guide for Twitter. Top tips, best practices and when Twitter goes bad!
What is Twitter?
Twitter is a 140 character micro-blogging broadcast platform accessible via the web (Twitter.com) and mobile platforms such as iOS, Android and WinMo.
History
Founded in 2006 Twitter was originally created to stay connected with a group of friends via SMS. It was never meant to be used on the internet hence the 140 character limit. Twitter was mostly funded through venture capitalists who to the tune of $ 50 million. For the first 3 years made a total of ‘zero’ dollars in revenues but is expected to make 1.54 billion dollars by the end of 2013 with over a billion users.
Why use Twitter?
Twitter can be used as a news channel, to recruit, crowd source deals, research anything, stay in touch with friends, get a date, channel traffic to your website and more.
How is it used?
Individuals and companies use Twitter to communicate with a community of followers who choose to follow them. 
They ‘Tweet’ stories, deals & interesting factoids to spread messages that they feel are fun, relevant or interesting to a potential following community. New followers search for keywords they’re interested in or look to their community for influential people to follow. Then they join in the conversation by ‘re-tweeting’ or adding to messages they read and the ‘reach’ increases as boring stories die off and interesting ones are perpetuated. E.g. Dell uses Twitter to sell graded desktops and laptops. Followers looking for a deal can follow the Dell Outlet Twitter stream to see when a tasty deal comes up.
Top Tips
- Social Media is about giving, loving, educating and generally putting something back into the pot. It is not about self-promotion or spamming i.e. over-use when your community is not interested. Our main top tip is to pick a context and be consistent.
- Secure a great Twitter handle – Quick! Before someone else takes it. There are terrible stories about squatters high jacking Twitter handles. Remember, each post can only have 140 charters so the longer your Twitter handle, the less space you have to interact!
- Add your Twitter handle to your website, email signature and business card. Make it easy for people to find you
- Make Your Bio Stand Out – You have 160 characters (20 more! Woop woop!) to define yourself (no pressure). Make sure this includes who you are, what you do and try and make it interesting
- Be Consistent – Think about your brand, tone and the conversations you want to have. Then stick to it. If you are a taxidermy specialist, don’t start giving advice on jam making. Define your goals and find your own personal voice. Social media is all about people.
- Listen – Take time out to see what people are talking about, what mentions are happening around your brand or subject matter. Familiarise yourself with the tone, language and conversations before jumping in. There are various monitoring tools that can help you do this.
- Reach Out – Don’t be shy, say hello, share your thoughts, and comment on other people’s streams.
- Take Time to make it work – Make sure you spend time everyday talking, reposing and posting content. It takes time and patients to get the ball rolling. Soon you will be a ‘Twitterholic’ like the rest of us.
- Find people and Get Listed – There are many ways to find relevant topics and people that will interest you. Twello, Listorious and Wefollow
Twitter speak – the basics
DM = Direct Message
@ = Use to reply and always include proceeding a Twitter ID in a reply
RT = Retweet – repeating someone else’s tweet while giving credit
Tweet = Sending a message on Twitter
‘Hashtags’ a hashtag is a topic with a hash symbol (“#”) at the begging of a word identify it. Please don’t use Hashtags willy nilly. It looks spammy
#FollowFriday or #FF – On Fridays, people like to suggest other Tweeters that are interesting, funny or just entertaining.
Shrink It!
You only have 140 precious characters, so unsightly, messy and long URLs (Hyperlinks or web addresses) have no place in your tweet! Use URL shorteners like bit.ly, tiny.url to shorten your URLS. If you are using a desktop application there is usually a function that will automatically shorten them for you. Remember, every time you don’t shorten your URL a fairy dies. E.g www.strictlysocial.co.uk/blog/story123 becomes something like http://ow.ly/4jlu0
Add A Picture and Customize Your Background
Are you a new egg? No, so add your face or logo. People prefer to see a friendly face. It makes you personable and human! If you have extra time on your hands, why not try personalising your background?
Apps, Apps and Apps
There are many different Twitter apps that make it easy to reply from your desktop and on the go.
Tweetdeck and Hootsuite are amongst our favourites.
Everyone hates me! On no! What to do when responding to complaints
Take a deep breath. Twitter has opened up communication and has given a voice to consumers, allowing everyone to give feedback – positive or negative. But all feedback is great to receive and if you respond quickly, timely and humanly these negative outbursts can be flipped to positive.
Again, people just need to be heard, valued and understood. Responding quickly, humanly and being understanding goes a long way.
Twitter Horror Stories
Sometimes social media can go VERY wrong.
One of the most famous disasters was @vodafoneUKs official account blasting their 22000 followers with a very offensive homophobic remark. Read more of this here.
Habitat made a terrible mistake of using the Iran protests to promote their chain and more social media sins are commited daily.
Kenneth Cole makes light of Egypt
Never make light of a serious situation that people care about. And if you do, don’t do it on a social platform! A bit like Habitat, Kenneth Cole did so in spectacular fashion with this statement:
“Millions are in uproar in #Cairo,” read the original tweet from Thursday morning. “Rumour is they heard our new spring collection is now available online at http://bit.ly/KCairo.”
Interesting Facts
- The first tweet on Twitter was by Jack Dorsey and the tweet was “Just setting up my twttr” on 21st March 2006.
- 75 million accounts of which only 2546 accounts are verified
- 80% of accounts are inactive
- Twitter generates over 65 million tweets everyday (That’s 750 tweets per second)
- It has over 70,000 registered applications
- Twitter handles 24 billion search queries a month. This means Twitter is the ranked #2 search engine behind Google which handles about 88 billion search queries (Yahoo 9.4bn, Bing 4.1bn).
- 40% of Tweets are pointless babble e.g. “I am having lunch”
- Twitter in Plain English video here
Popular Twitter Applications
Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, TwitPic, Seesmic, Cotweet, Tweello (Apps for all kinds of things. Google them and have a play)
