Building Community & Your Brand With Twitter
The other day I had the opportunity to sit down and chat with a very valuable social media mentor Mark Silver. At some point in the conversation we started talking about the value of twitter and I received some very good advice, which I am going to share now.
I recently began my jump into the social media world this year and have always thought of twitter as a social media site where people follow celebrities or friends to keep tabs on their personal lives. I never considered that twitter could be a powerful business tool if you understand how to use it.
When Mark shared his twitter strategy it reminded me of Gary Vaynerchuk’s rules about building a brand and a community at the end of his book, “Crush It”. Gary has several steps that he used to “Crush It” and Gary’s steps are very similar with Mark’s “Tweet Rules for Success” as I like to refer to them now.
- Tweet Valueable content (Like a link to this blog!)
- Re-Tweet valueable content that you find on twitter
- Start conversations with people who are tweeting about valuable content
There are several tools out there to help you do this such as HootSuite which has a very useful browser toolbar widget called Hootlet. I have been using this to tweet blogs or interesting websites.. You simply click on the Hootlet in your toolbar and it creates a tweet based on the website you are viewing.
The other tool that makes it easy to find tweets that are relevant to your interests is TweetDeck. This is a powerful twitter searching tool due to it’s column concept. You can add a column based on a Tweet Search.. for example: I am interested in Agile & SCRUM so I added a column based on a search for those two words. Whenever someone tweets and it contains the word Agile or SCRUM it will appear in my column. I can then take a look at what was tweeted if it looks interesting, re-tweet it or reach out to that user and follow them or startup a conversation.
