The Ultimate Twitter Starters Guide

Setting up and getting started:

• Choose a short username so that users can easily retweet your posts easily without running out of 140 characters
• Ensure that you have completed your profile fully
• Write a short description of yourself and your business 
• Include a link to your website in your description
• You have added a clear picture of yourself/logo
• You have connected your Facebook profile to your Twitter profile so that you can also post tweets to your Facebook page automatically
• Ensure that you can choose which notifications you want to get by email so that you never lose any opportunity for engagement
• You know that you can get a Twitter app for your smartphone and tablet so you can tweet on the go
• You are aware that you can change your profile theme so that it is more appealing to your audience
• You are aware that you can create and manage widgets from your settings menu

Tweeting:

• You are aware that a tweet can only be 140 characters or 130 characters if you include a link
• You know that you can use tools to shrink the URLs you want to include in your tweets
• You are aware that it’s better to keep your tweets shorter than 130 characters so that other users can retweet them and not lose any valuable information

You know what hashtags are:

• You are aware that you have a list of trending topics and hashtags on the left hand side of your Twitter home page
• You are using one or two hashtags for each of your tweets
• You are using trending hashtags in order to raise engagement and get more followers
• You are aware that you can promote a tweet so that more people can see it
• You know that you can add photos and images on your tweets, not just text posts
• You are aware that if you ask in your tweets for people to “retweet” and you don’t shorten it to RT then you have a better chance of getting retweets
• You are asking questions and answering other peoples’ questions in order to raise engagement
• You are aware that you can use tools to schedule tweets for when you are busy (try Hootsuite or Socialoomph)

You know what a direct message is:

• You know that you can only send direct messages to people that you are following and that are following you back
• You are aware that you can schedule direct messages to send to all of your new followers via Socialoomph
• You know that you have to tweet often as your followers’ home pages or constantly changing 

BUT

• You are not sending too many tweets at the same time so as not to flood your Followers streams
• You have checked your analytics and You know when your audience is most active on Twitter and that is when you tweet the most

Following and Followers:

• You are aware that it’s better to have less, but more engaged followers than thousands of uninterested followers
• You are following people that are part of your target audience
• You are aware that you can use tools to bulk unfollow people who are inactive or are not following you back
• You are constantly interacting with your followers:
• Retweeting their posts
• Answering their questions
• Thanking them for retweeting or sharing your tweets and posts
• Favoriting their tweets

BUT

• You are no sending out too many sales messages

Tools:

• You have searched Google and you are aware that there is a plethora of tools that you can use to:
• Manage several Twitter profiles and other social media profiles from the same dashboard
• Schedule tweets and DMs
• Schedule recurring tweets
• Shrink URLs
• Get your Twitter analytics so that you can tweet better

And:

• You are committed to mastering the art of Twitter engagement – and growing your business!