A quick, down and dirty guide to the basic information every business needs to know about using Twitter.

1. Effective Twitter Practices for
Businesses
Dane Jackson
@danejacksona2

2. What is Twitter?
Twitter is a micro-blogging social media
network that allows users to connect with each
other, as well as with brands and businesses.
One major differentiation between Twitter and
Facebook is that on Twitter every interaction
(tweet) can only be 140 characters. Because of
this, Twitter is a fast, easy, and direct way to
communicate.

3. Why Businesses Should Care About
Twitter
• 11 Twitter accounts are created every second.
• Twitter has over 465 million accounts.
• There are 175 million tweets a day.
• The top three countries for Twitter accounts
are the USA (107.7 million accounts), Brazil
(33.3 million accounts), and Japan (29.9
million accounts).
• Information provided by

4. What Twitter Says…
Every day, millions of people use Twitter to create, discover and share ideas with
others. Now, people are turning to Twitter as an effective way to reach out to
businesses, too. From local stores to big brands, and from brick-and-mortar to
internet-based or service sector, people are finding great value in the connections
they make with businesses on Twitter.
With all of these things in mind…it’s imperative to get
your business on Twitter!
Here’s how…

5. How to use Twitter as a Business
1. Determine your brand’s plan of action: Will your account be for
customer support, commercial gains, customer relations, or a mixture
of all three.
2. Avoid one-way marketing messages: Instead, engage your followers, be
personal, build relations, and most importantly, BE AUTHENTIC – tweet
with, not at your followers. (This means relying solely on autofeeds and
scheduled tweets is a bad idea and will result in limited engagement
with your followers!)
3. Follow an “80/20” rule where 80% of your tweets are conversational and
personal and 20% of your tweets are more geared towards company
initiatives and products
4. Relevant keywords and #hashtags are key to spreading your messages!
5. Make sure your Twitter handle or a link to your account is visible on ALL
company websites and customer-facing marketing
material.
This is a great example from
www.thewholebraingroup.com letting
you know what networks they use.

6. Twitter gives your customers unprecedented access to your
company, which means you may have to answer customer
service issues in a public forum. It’s important to be fast and
transparent when answering customer service-related tweets.

7. Never fear though, customers won’t always use Twitter to air their
grievances. Make sure you answer the good tweets as well since your
customers took the time to write them. It will help you build
relationships with your followers.
Also, feel free to tweet in your own voice to enhance authenticity of
your interaction – keep it PG though as you don’t want to offend your
followers!

8. With how easy it is for customers to tweet about you, it’s important you also have the tools to
monitor your brand on Twitter. Since Twitter is a cost-effective way to manage customer service,
here are a few cost-effective tools to manage your brand’s presence on Twitter.
www.hootsuite.com
www.tweetdeck.com
www.monitter.com
www.socialmention.com

9. Further Reading
• www.mashable.com
• www.socialmediaexaminer.com
• www.business.twitter.com

10. Contact Dane
If you have any further questions, please don’t
hesitate to contact me.
• @danejacksona2 on twitter
• dane.jackson@gmail.com
• http://www.linkedin.com/in/danejackson