DIY – How To Create A Twitter Account to Brand Yourself & Grow Your Sales Force & Consumer Base

Looking for a new way to advertise, optimize & grow your business?? Twitter is essential to expanding your market reach online and improving sales & conversions.

Trust us, if you have a business then you need to have a Twitter handle.

Ok, a twitter handle is that @usernamehere you often see all over the web or marketing materials. This indicated a web page or “micro blog” on twitter for said username.

For example, Cal Coast selected the username calcoast on Twitter.com; therefor our twitter handle is @calcoast. And our web page on Twitter is www.Twitter.com/calcoast.

So, it woudl make sense to add @calcoast to the bottom of our business cards and email signatures and link them up to http://www.twitter.com/calcoast.

Then we would tell people to please “follow us on Twitter @calcoast.”

Now back to the show folks…

Whether created by you, your boss, or the Cal Coast Web Design team themselves, your Twitter account is a means to market your product or service, to market your company, & to establish your brand!

Whether getting ready to do yourself or passing along to a helping hand, you need to get educated with Twitter 101 if you want your business to be a thriving part of the web marketing experience where companies continue to flourish even in a daunting economy.

Follow these steps on How To Create a Twitter Account Tutorial

1. Visit Twitter.com
2. Select “Sign Up Now”
3. Fill in variables according to your business.Please be sure to consider KEYWORDS here for your username. Its so important to both BRAND yourself and include keywords that your target market may be typing in to find you, your products or your services.So, while you would want to use your business name (or personal name if that’s what you are branding), your username would be better as a keyword. Unfortunately only so many characters are allowed to make it easy to remember your twitter handle. So try and do your best. I just set up a twitter handle for an Orange County moving company so I made their handle @ocmovingco.

   If you want to see if your friends are on twitter, we suggest you take the few extra minutes to take this step. This will allow you to easily connect with friends and family and expand your salesteam and follow base quickly and easily.

4. Once that step is complete, you are at your twitter.com homepage. This (like your Facebook wall) is a compilation of everything you are tweeting and the tweeple you follow are tweeting (people you follow are posting.)It is here where you land each time you log in. This is also where you have a top right nav to make edits to your account. Lets do that now.
5. Click on “Settings””Account” tab – ensure you fill all these variable out entirely with your website URL, bio with keywords and more! Please do not click on “protect my tweets.” This will make it so that other people, potential customers & the search engines can not see your updates.There will also be a “(You can also add Twitter to your site here)” option as well. We will return to this once you have something worth sharing.

   Save

   In order to receive and make updates from your phone, just click on the “Devices” tab. Enter in your mobile number and follow on screen directions. Once you receive your confirmation text, simply save it as a contact in your phone called “Twitter” so you can text this contact any time you want to update your twitter status from your cell.

   Save

   We recommend you use leave your “Notices” tab at default options. If you would like attitudinal notifications set up for your business name or industry related keywords, refer to the Tweet Beep Alerts Manual.

   Under the “Picture” tab, ensure you update this with a picture of yourself, your logo or other brand recognizable photo.

   Under the “Design” tab optimize your page by selecting an available page background or color to match your marketing materials.

   We recommend uploading your own background photo that is custom edited with background info or use a free twitter background tool like My Tweet Space. If you do use a 3rd party for the background, ensure you still update your colors so that your right hand nav still matches your new Twitter background.

6. Begin populating content onto your homepage by clicking “Home” in your twitter account. Start making announcements. Like what you ask?
   • Company news & announcements
   • Contests, coupons and other interactive components.
   • Business tools and resources you’ve recently discovered
   • What you’re reading currently
   • ANYTHING

   Your twitter account is worth revisiting and “following” if you update it regularly with both valuable information and FUN! Go ahead, go to your homepage and just answer “What are you doing?”

   For an example of information to utilize follow Cal Coast Web Design on Twitter @CalCoast.

7. Return to your “Settings.” There will be a “(You can also add Twitter to your site here)” option as well. Click on this to get code and instructions for adding a Twitter updater widget to your site or other online presence.Follow on screen prompts using your best judgment for the best client selection and implement accordingly.
8. Now that you have something worth visiting, get out there and start tweeting and following your tweeps! More on this to follow!