Any advice about Twitter for business?

i am about to embark on opening a twitter account for Clarkie Designs. Do you have any advice about starting, how often I should ‘tweet’ etc?
Also do you think my twitter name should reflect my business or be more personal? I do want this to be a promotional tool - I don’t have any personal friends on Twitter but know I need not to make it solely about self promotion and I am hoping to make some like minded twitter friends!
Emma

Hi Emma. I love twitter. My advice on choosing your name would be to get as close to Clarkie Designs as possible. Try not to use any capitals, punctuation marks, dashes etc in your name as these are hard for people to remember and hard for people to type in on phones. If you can, try and get clarkiedesigns
Try and think of twitter as ‘social media’ i.e. Be sociable. If you follow and engage with others, they will follow you back. Chat to others, share other peoples tweets. Try and aim to tweet about 70% chit chat and only 30% promo tweets about your products. I would do no more than 1 promotional tweet a day, the rest of your tweets should be about other things. Telling stories about your products and not direct selling is also good.
If you want to follow me on twitter, I’m @millyandpip I’ll send a tweet out to my followers to introduce you.
Don’t forget to follow @folksy too x

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Thanks Ali so much. That’s great advice about the username. I am busy with orders tonight but plan to get on to twitter this week so when I do I will come and find you! x

That’s very good advice Ali, and advice I wish I’d had when I blundered into setting up my Twitter account some time ago. Mine is @JulieNightOwl - because I couldn’t get NightOwlCreative (grrr!) though it’s how a lot of people refer to me anyway, so I guess it’s ok. But eek - the capitals! I did mine like that because I’m a bit OCD about such things, but should I change it to lower case? Can I change it? It looks like I could, but does it actually matter? I’ve tried typing it in search both ways and either way it seems to find me.

I’ve followed you Ali, and Emma, I will do the same when you get set up - let us know. :smile:

Julie

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I can’t add much to what Ali has said-people don’t like to respond to “spammy” tweets with links! But I would also say that you can target the people you follow to the types of people that your customers are likely to follow (because they might follow you back after a conversation) and the more people you follow, the more followers you will get. People tend to respond to photographs better than text as well!

Sam x

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Ah, yes, you’re right Julie, it seems that it’s OK to find you in lower case even if your name has capitals in it.
P.s.@JulieNightowl is a great twitter name as it’s very memorable which is a good thing :smile:

Thanks for the reassurance Ali, and the vote of confidence. I used to hate it when people called me Julie Nightowl, I don’t know why, but these days I am warming to it. Fortunately I’ve managed to keep it consistent across Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter, so that’s another plus.

Right I am now on Twitter @clarkiedesigns Still too nervous to tweet but will think of something soon. Off to follow you guys now and thanks for the advice x

Congrats on getting the username Emma!

Cool. I’ve followed you…& sent you a tweet :0)
A good way to start to follow people is to click on someones @ name and go through the list of people who they follow.
So for example, click on @folksy Just below the banner, there is a ‘following’ heading. This is all the people that @folksy follow. Scroll through the people and click on ‘follow’ to follow them.
You can also find people by searching for #'s in the search box. So for example if you search for #folksy you’ll find all the people on twitter who are talking about folksy (as long as they added #folksy in their tweet)
Apologies if I am telling you something you already know x

Not at all Ali any advice welcome - thank you x

You’re welcome.
You might want to try creating lists in your twitter account. This is a great tool to help you to keep up to date with people who you follow. You can then start to build relationships with these people and in return they may reply to your tweets, RT you (re tweet) recommend you to their followers, help you if you tweet a question (top tip, tweeting a question is a really good way of getting people to interact with you)
I have quite a few lists set up, for example, I have a ‘designer/maker’ one, so I can keep up with what people in my industry are doing. ‘Favourite tweeters’ these are people who make me laugh or I find really interesting. ‘Local’ this includes local designer/makers, local restaurants, local businesses etc. When you’ve organised your followers into your lists, you will be able to see really quickly what all these people are doing by simply clicking on your ‘lists’ link.
To create a list, click on your profile and click on ‘list’ under your banner, then click on ‘create new list’. Once your list is set up, click on each person you follow, click on the little cog that is next to the ‘follow’ button and select 'add or remove from lists’
Happy tweeting :0)

Hey, I just wanted to say that I’m in a similar position and this post has some great advice which I shall use too, so thank you! Mandie

Just popped over to Twitter & followed you all, happy tweeting @Daisywings2 :slight_smile: :slight_smile:

I have popped and found you Tina.
A quick question - when you share on FB you can make a comment. can you do the same when you retweet or not?

Thanks for following me on Twitter and no, you can’t make a comment on a Twitter retweet, not unless anyone else knows of a way, of course. Great to meet you, see you on twitter soon! :slight_smile: :slight_smile:

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Yes, you can make a comment when you share a tweet if you use twitter via twitter.com on your phone (you may be able to do it using other apps, but I don’t know about them) Click on the square arrow button underneath the tweet (I hope you know what I mean by that) and click on ‘quote tweet’. It then brings up the tweet and you can add to it. It’s normal to add your comment after the tweet using a > symbol. You may need to edit the original tweet a little when you quote it to take some characters out. I add RT (re tweet ) at the beginning and I remove any " and : symbols as this helps to get it down to 140 characters.
The other way I share and add a comment is via twitter.com on the PC. I copy the tweet, then I click the arrow underneath the tweet and paste it in the box. I then edit it if needed and put an > afterwards and make my comment. If you look at my twitter feed you’ll hopefully know what I mean.