Twitter for Business: The Basics
Twitter is a fantastic communication medium. In a few short years it has gone from a small startup to a worldwide phenomenon. It has helped people in some of the worst parts of world have a voice. It is also a great tool for businesses to connect with their customers.
Speak Don’t Shout
This is a fundamental of using Twitter. Unlike other mediums of communicating like TV or radio, Twitter is not simply for broadcasting information. It’s also for talking. This is a key issue that many new Twitter users, especially businesses, do not always understand. It’s good to tell your followers about a new product launch, a blog post or some other announcement. But that shouldn’t be your sole reason for having a Twitter account.
Many businesses choose to provide basic customer support via Twitter, ask their customers’ opinions and more. As well as sharing links and announcements about their company, they also share information about other events in their industry. This makes companies seem more human and certainly more approachable. A loyal group of followers could be the biggest asset in a companies’ marketing arsenal.
Prove it!
Maintaining a successful Twitter account does require some effort. Here’s a couple of examples of some companies that I think are really engaging with their customers via Twitter. I would wager that they’d both say social media has helped their business in some way.
CurdBee – Online Billing
CurdBee is a simple online invoicing service. I use it for my invoicing and it is excellent. Using their Twitter account they provide basic customer support, ask the opinions of their customers and broadcast CurdBee-related announcements. The rapport that they build with their customers via Twitter probably increases the likelihood that those customers will stick around. It also increases the value of their broadcast-type tweets, increasing the chance that their followers will click the links and retweet their announcements.
Half Pints Brewing Company
If you follow me on Twitter or read my personal blog you’ll know that I enjoy good beer. Manitoba’s best (and maybe only?!) micro-brewery is Half Pints. They produce some delicious beers, but that’s for another post. They are relatively new to the Twitter game but have already managed to amass a good amount of loyal followers (for a small, local brewery). They use Twitter both to announce new products and events, but also to talk to their customers about the thing they love, good beer!
Those are just two examples from small companies I follow, but I am sure you could find thousands more.
When Announcing, Do it a few times
It’s all very well tweeting about a new blog post at 3 in morning after you’ve finally finished editing it, but how many people are going to click that link? Not many. The majority of frequent Twitter users do not read their whole feed, they just read the recent activity. When someone is following a hundred people, it’s unlikely they’ll read every single tweet. Chances are they’ll miss your tweet, even if they are interested in what you said. You need to say it a few times, at different times of day. This can be difficult, especially because you probably have real work to do. The problem becomes worse if your followers are spread out across the world.
The easiest way to tweet about your latest awesome thing is to use a tweet scheduling app.
BufferApp is the first one I used. It allows you to write tweets and place them in your “buffer”. Each tweet is then sent out at pre-determined times (you can set when). BufferApp works well but has two big limitations. The free version only allows up to ten tweets in your Buffer and you cannot set the times for each individual tweet to go out. Rather, you choose times when tweets will be sent (for example, every day at 4pm and 8pm) and at that time each day, BufferApp will send out the next tweet in the Buffer. Buffer has excellent analytics features which allow you to see how many people your tweet reached (via people retweeting it).
Another app I recently discovered is CoTweet. It has a wealth of collaboration and multi-account features that go far beyond tweet scheduling but unlike BufferApp it allows you to schedule specific tweets for specific times. It also has some limited analytics features.
Conclusion
I don’t pretend to be a Twitter wizard but I hope a few of these tips will help you better understand how Twitter can help your business. The principles of conversing with and listening to your clients can be just as easily applied to Facebook and dare I say it, day-to-day business!
Get tweeting and talking! Oh, and you could follow me on Twitter.
Tweaked Look & New Portfolio
Admittedly, I have been pretty terrible updating my own website! However, I have now finally got round to tweaking it for 2011. There are a few, cool new things to note:
- Portfolio: Bigger and better! I have updated my portfolio, adding my latest work. I’ve also made portfolio images much bigger so you can see what these websites look like at a glance
- Simpler. All pages were getting a little cluttered so I have cleaned things up and removed a number of uneccessary things.
- New Font. I recently discovered the new Gibson font. Having purchased it I decided that my own website was probably a great place to give it a try. It may also make its way to my logo some day…
- Tweaked Text. The main text of each page should now be more readable.
I hope everyone is having a great 2011 so far, I really hope I get the chance to work with some more awesome people. If you are interested in talking about a project, call me on 204 381 0107.
PS. If you are based in the Caribbean and need a web designer, I’m your man. I will need an expenses paid trip to your location to meet with you in person, thanks 
Why you should develop offline
I recently started diving deeper into web developing and learning more about the code that powers the web. I quickly came across the idea of having a web server running on your local computer. Offline, local web development servers are just like real web servers, except they run on your computer. Here’s a few popular, and free, web development server packages:
- WAMP – Includes Apache, MYSQL and PHP and runs on Windows
- MAMP – Similar to WAMP but for the Mac operating system
- XAMPP – Like the other two, but also includes Perl. XAMPP has versions for Windows, Mac, Linux and Solaris.
I was a bit skeptical about the benefits of these packages until I started doing more website development. If you’re on the fence, here are a few of the advantages to developing your website and applications on your computer instead of on your “live” server.
Security
A hole in your PHP application can affect the integrity of your entire server. If you’re developing an application on a local computer, the only person that can access it is you so you don’t need to worry about running untested code that is still being developed.
Convenience & Speed
Instead of editing a file, saving, uploading, waiting and then refreshing, all your files are on your local computer. You just need to save and refresh the browser. This will make your development go much faster.
No lengthy uploads
If you have large files that need to be used in the testing of your website or app, they don’t need to be uploaded, you just need to put them in the correct folder on your computer.
Free!
Having a dedicated development server will cost a significant amount of money per month. Using one of the above packages is totally free and comes with even more benefits.
Website Downtime
If you upload some untested code to your live web server and run it, a small mistake in the code could potentially bring down your entire server. This could create a lot of unwanted headaches for you and your clients.
Conclusion
If you’re getting into web development, there is no reason why you shouldn’t try one of these great solutions out. It can make developing web applications a much more enjoyable and secure process.