There's no need to feel like this!

I’m sure you’ve heard of twitter. No, actually, if you’re reading this article, I’ll guarantee that you’ve heard of twitter!

But, have you heard of “tweeple”? “Twitterati”? “Twitterhea”?

If not, never fear. Follow GGM’s carefully honed six-step process, and you’ll never have to figure out why you should cringe at the word “Twitterhea”.

More after the break!

Step One: Make use of TweetDeck!

TweetDeck is a free program that can vastly improve the efficiency of your “twittering”. Once you’ve entered your twitter account information into TweetDeck, you can post “tweets”, monitor incoming tweets, get notified every time someone adds you, Direct Messages you, or “ReTweets” one of your “tweets”, all from your desktop.

The real benefit of TweetDeck is that it runs off of your desktop, which means you won’t be tied down to a clunky (and sometimes slow) web interface. Sleek, sexy, and fast – that’s TweetDeck!

Step Two: Schedule your tweets using SocialOomph.com’s “tweet later” feature.

By making use of SocialOomph’s “tweet later” feature, you can keep up a regular stream of tweet, even when you’re away from the office! Tweeting regularly (at least twice per day, but preferably more) is highly recommended toward making effective use of your twitter account.

Simply find the infromation you want to tweet, type them into the “schedule updates” panel once you’ve signed into SocialOomph, and set the time interval that you’d like SocialOomph to send out those tweets! You can schedule far more than one tweet, which is what makes this (free!) service so useful.

Step Three: Use a blog to vastly improve Twitter’s effectiveness in driving traffic to your website (that’s the whole point after all, isn’t it?)

This is probably my biggest beef with people who tweet for business. They fall under the delusion that simply tweeting all day long — random news articles, thoughts, whatever — will magically drive traffic to their website.

Not so! Unless you’re including a link to somewhere on your website along with every tweet, all Twitter will do for your business is raise the general public’s awareness of your brand. Might you get some residual traffic from that increased brand awareness? Possibly – but it’ll be rather like taking a canoe when you could have caught the ferry.

No matter what you tweet – a news update from Reuters, new legislation announced by the SEC, a quick blurb on what you think about the local economy – write up a short blog post about it, and then tweet your headline and a link to the blog post!

I should note that to maximize effectiveness, you simply must host your blog on your own domain! (i.e. “http://www.GoGarraty.com/blog“, not ”http://www.wordpress.com/GarratyGroupisSuperCool“).

Step Four: Link your twitter account with your Facebook and LinkedIn accounts!

It has become very, very easy to interlink your different social media platforms nowadays – and the more integration between your varying platforms (including your website!), the better!

So log into Facebook and log into LinkedIn and adjust your settings so that whenever you post an update to twitter, it actomagically sends that same update to your respective “status boxes” in Facebook and LinkedIn. There are plenty of people who use Facebook, but not Twitter or LinkedIn, or LinkedIn but not Facebook or Twitter — catch them all!

Step Five: For the love of God, tweet RELEVENT content!

I honestly can’t begin to fathom the amount of business tweeters out there who post tweets that look like this:

@MikesProductionHouse tweets: Launched a new product today. Very excited!

Of course, to avoid lawsuits/provoking the wrath of our attorney, Mike isn’t a real person (we hope). But honestly, Mike! The first rule of twittering for business is to make people like you by tweeting things that will add value or otherwise enrich their lives. And if you’re sitting there saying, “Well, my product does enrich peoples’ lives!” — go back to the front door, read the sign, and check your ego.

The plain truth is that nobody on twitter cares to hear about your stupid product. They’re there to be entertained, not harassed by sales pitches. So go out there and bring them information that will interest them, bring them information that will help them, and via that, build goodwill among your followers. Trust me, that goodwill will come in VERY handy when they stumble onto your website and start thinking about buying.

Step Six: Keep your ReTweets to a minimum.

A “ReTweet” or “RT” in Twitter parlance is when you take what another twitter user has already written and “retweet” it in its exact form to your group of followers. A typical RT might look something like this:

@MikesProductionHouse tweets: RT @GarratyGroup – Obama lays the smackdown on banks – http://bit.ly/Uj3H4

This means that Mike has taken something that we (Garraty Group) tweeted, copied it, and sent it to his own list of twitter followers. In a general sense, there’s nothing wrong with RTs (as long as proper credit is given).

However, the pitfall to avoid is to ONLY send out Retweets. Hell, nobody likes that person at the party who repeats the same joke that someone else told thirty minutes earlier, expecting people to laugh all over again, right? It works the same on Twitter. If all you do is RT, your followers will begin to think that you aren’t capable of producing original thought — or at least sourcing your own material from other places.

Instead, they’ll begin to develop an image of you lazily clicking the “retweet” button every time someone else says something of interest. And ever so insipidly, that image of laziness will begin to creep into their perception of your brand and your business as a whole!