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Five Twitter Power Tips for the Entrepreneur

  • May 19, 2011
How can/should small business people blur the lines between personal and work tweets? Most people expect the entrepreneur and solo practitioner to have a personality, unlike large corporations. Erik Deckers, author of Branding Yourself: How to Use Social Media to Invent or Reinvent Yourself, shows how entrepreneurs can take advantage of that personality expectation and reach people more easily.
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Entrepreneurs and small business people have to wear all kinds of hats in their small business: sales, product development, marketing… not to mention bookkeeping, payroll, and delivery. Here are five tips to effectively use Twitter to market your business.

#1: Set Up a Listening Post

The best way to find out if people are talking about you, your company, or your industry is to listen. Use search.twitter.com/ or TweetDeck, and search for keywords that people are likely to use. Also, make sure you're using terms that people use, not the terms you would like them to use. Create lists that contain only those search terms. If people are tweeting about the keywords, you can know what they're asking or talking about and respond to them appropriately.

Once people use these terms in their tweets, respond to them if it's appropriate. Do it personally, rather than setting up some automated response that sends out a canned message anytime someone uses your keywords. It adds a personal touch and lets you make the call about whether to send a tweet, or whether it would seem inappropriate and spammy.

Your listening post also lets you see how popular certain keywords are. Do comparisons between the most commonly searched words on Google using their Keywords Tool, and whether those words are frequently used on Twitter.

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