Rock the World with Twitter

Excerpt from Rock the World with Social Media – coming October 2010

For anyone serious about social media, a basic understanding of and activity in Twitter is a requirement. At the very least you need to understand the issues. The only way to understand the issues is to be a user.

Image via Wikipedia

If you are new, we recommend you setup a personal Twitter account and build out your BIO as a hybrid of 80% personal and 20% business text. Your 160 character bio should be keywords rather than sentences. It is a good idea to group keywords visually and separate difference sets with a vertical pipe or some other symbol like this:

Creative genius | photographer – commercial, advertising, editorial | love to hike & ski | dedicated family man | into cartoons and comedy

The BIO above is only 138 of an allowed 160 characters. You should use as many of the 160 characters as you possibly can. It will help you be found in searches both on Twitter search as well as on related sites such as Twellow. (Twellow.com is the yellow pages of Twitter, sorting entries based on keywords found in BIOs and locations as entered by users.)

A background image is highly recommended; for personal accounts, it can be slanted mostly toward the personal side of you. Still, we suggest you look at what other people in your same demographic are doing when you create a look for yourself. You are branding yourself, after all, and there is no better place to create a visual and “instant” brand for yourself than Twitter.

Unless you have the skills to do it yourself, be prepared to pay an average of $150 for a good personalized background page. If you need assistance, we recommend you use someone who understands the nuances of building a background that will fit for a variety of screen resolutions. You can find information to contact our graphic artist on our site RockTheWorldBook.com/extras.

Consider tools like HootSuite to organize your Twitter communications, especially on a Smartphone. Twitter and Smartphones are like Lennon and McCartney. They just go together brilliantly!

For more information about Rock the World with Social Media, our second book in the “Rock the World” series, please email training@integratedalliances.com. We’d love to talk with you! Or, post a comment here and we’ll respond promptly to your thoughts and ideas.