The basics:how to set up your Twitter profile
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.
How to be found more often? Building your online audience
Like the shampoo ad, ‘it won’t happen overnight, but it WILL happen…’ Building up your online reach doesn’t happen in 24 hours, there is an investment of time, energy, patience and strategy involved.
Some week’s growth will be slower than others, some sites and announcements will be more popular and drive traffic and bookings than others.
Expect results and trends in 2-3 months rather than astonishing growth within the first month… be realistic about growing your social media visibility and fitting into online communities as a new brand and marketing entrant.
As you will hear all over the web, you need to ‘join the community’ and become an interactive regular participant over weeks and months.
- It can take between 15 minutes and approximately up to an hour daily to maintain a successful social media program.
- If different staff take responsibility for a separate component of your online strategy, then the workload is shared across less than 15-30 minutes daily for anyone; and no-one is deluged.
- Everyone also gets to enjoy a slice of ownership of the overall online marketing project and see their efforts turn into wins – and hopefully sales and new clients.
Some days will only involve quick updates or posts, or checks for messages, on others staff will be adding new material to profiles, posting up pictures or videos; or setting up a coordinated campaign across all of your social media sites.
Let people know how to find you online:
- Add your LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook badges to your site’s home page. You’ll find them either through your social profile’s account dashboards, or often on the bottom menu bar – Twitter calls them ‘Goodies’ and offers widgets, tweet buttons and badge options, Facebook has both widgets and buttons
- Add your social media links to your Contact Us and home pages, email signature, and wherever appropriate on marketing materials and all of your online ‘touch points’
- Start to think about all appropriate onsite and offsite ways to promote and integrate your social media profiles and activity, eg. the back of your next new business card runs, onsite information; and any promotional information, on brochure materials or flyers etc.
- Share tools – www.Sharethis.com – one of the leading ‘share’ buttons. Install on your site and blog so visitors can quickly and immediately share what they find with others online
- Streamline and scheduling – www.SocialOoomph.com – one of many ‘share’ services and tools to automate and streamline all of your social media and online activity, but a very good one. A suite of services to browse, at varying buy-in and price points
More on paid audience-building tools in another post – on the pros and cons and what’s out there at reasonable rates to help you boost audiences over and above your organic efforts.
Much Twittering About the ‘New Twitter’
With headlines like ‘The Facebookification of Twitter’ – read on at http://bit.ly/apRsNW – and ‘The New Twitter Is an Attack on All Desktop Apps’ – http://bit.ly/dnoNy1 – the online social media blogs and publications are in their element, analysing and setting out their initial reactions to Twitter’s first HQ news conference.
But wait, there’s more…Twitter Redesign Moving To A Consumption Platform – http://bit.ly/crYCgU
They’re right too, this certainly does serve it up to the main players in the Twitter desktop apps. market, taking back onsite much of the functionality that previously we’ve had to go offsite to leverage.
Given the number of apps that many of us are working with and the features we’re dipping into across multiple desktop and mobile apps, any degree of simplification is going to be welcomed.
One-stop efficiencies will convert many online marketers and their clients who are time poor and struggling to streamline their online marketing at the best of times. Except perhaps by the likes of HootSuite, Tweetdeck and Seesmic who’ve built up their business platforms on their third-party services and will now be working smart and fast to develop new suites of services and revenue streams. The roll-out is very much still in process as of early October, so they’ll be doing their behind-the-scenes homework before it hits for the masses.
But given that the vast majority of individuals and organisations are just now piling onto social media in mid-late 2010 – and that many of them will never even know there was an ‘old Twitter’ before their time – the new format and its sidebar ‘site within a site’ options will soon be mainstream for most of us.
