Communications Insights

After a recent round of giving social media workshops, participants are saying that although they know they can eventually figure it out solo, “how to” help is one of the things they want most.

So here’s a quick ‘how to set up Twitter’ run-down, before you even get to the part about building up followers.

Set up your core Twitter account to get started, with logo, color match for branding, your background artwork, and your bio information.

You need:

• Your chosen profile name/s
• To select the best possible profile name: go to Twitter.com and select the strongest (and most search-relevant) name for your profile that the upper character limit for names (15 characters) will allow.  Given that many names are already taken, this may involve some creativity and testing several options.  Think about how people will search for you on the platform and get the most search-friendly name that you can.
• Password
• Contact email
• Alternate email
• Security question / answer
• Thumbnail sized pic or version of your logo or image for your profile pic
• A second pic or graphic for background artwork – either a vertical banner for the left-hand side, or a version that fills the background (behind the tweet stream/sidebar in the centre). This is your chance to brand your page, either visually or via factual information eg. contact details, key selling points, promotional text etc.
• 140-160 character short bio – a short snapshot that sums you up to a visitor

Once you’ve set up a profile, it’s live on the system, so can be found by anyone seeking you out, or searching for generic words that contain your name. Make sure that even if you start a profile, then have to leave it for a week or so, that the basics are in place, if people do find it while you’re still setting up.

You can now keep changing and improving it as you like over weeks and months ahead.  Branding is important, but there is plenty of latitude for experimentation and testing out what works for you.  Profile pages on social media are often less formal than your own site, think corporate but conversational.

Now to start building your early tweets and followers, so the profile isn’t deserted when you seriously start your Twitter activity. People will follow if you have interesting and relevant things to say and if your Twitter profile is not too aggressively promotional.

Start tweeting.  You need to have at least 10-20 tweets in place so that new visitors will see something when they land on the page, then possibly flip over to find earlier pages of your tweets.

After about another week of patiently adding to these early efforts, the profile will look suitably ‘populated’ to give it repeat strong bursts of audience-building.