I absolutely cannot say enough good things about twitter- its AMAZING for free advertising and getting the word out!! I have lost count of the number of people who tell me they have found me through Twitter and but I know my business volume has more than doubled since I began using it!
It is a bit overwhelming at first, but Christine is giving everyone great tips and believe me its worth it :-)
A couple of things I emphasize:
Think Keywords when you are posting. Not in a spammy way or keyword overload like you see in an Ebay listing title (shudder, Im so glad I dont ebay anymore!!), but think about how you word things. The thing is, a LOT of people use twitter replacement to find people they are interested in and your tweets are more likely to get picked up by totally random strangers if you make sure to include relevent words in your tweet. For instance, instead of a tweet that just says "sale in my iCraft shop" include a keyword about your product "
Jewelry sale in my iCraft shop" or in my case
Fairy Elven Jewelry sale in my iCraft shop" :-) Because my jewelry appeals to a very specific demographic, its important for me to include words that will help attract them- let them know its not your run of the mill jewelry- its MAGICK jewelry, lol
I have over 2000 followers, and the majority of them I did NOT follow first..they found me because I was tweeting things in their interest area
a couple other random rules of thumb:
Don't ever just post a link- always try to give a pithy attention getting bitit of a description(like Christine with her subject titles).
On the other hand, dont go the other way and just sound like an advert all the time- be yourself, be personable and let your personality shine through in your tweets :-)
Dont tweet a million times per minute (I used to be guilty of this sometimes and my beloved children were the ones who pointed out it was obnoxious when it filled up their whole update page, lol)
My personal opinion- if you are tweeting your business its best to leave religion and politics out of it for the most part. I have VERY strong views on these things and it was hard for me to do that, but I think its probably safer in the long run (Especially since I have really weird views for a fairytale loving hippy chick, lol).
My favorite tool on twitter:TWITTERFEED!!!
Here is a basic article on how to set it up:
http://www.ehow.com/how_4836251_twitterfeed-maximize-use-of-twitterfeed.htmlI use twitterfeed to keep things going when I dont have time to twitter..it sets up to take RSS feeds and post them to twitter occasionally. I have my blog and some of my shops set up through twitterfeed
A couple things I recommend:
Dont over do it- it will take up to the 5 most recent posts, but I found if I am relisting or listing a lot at once that gets annoying and seems more like spam! I have it set to ony the 2 most recent, that seems to be plenty.
If you plan to have lots of feeds going in to it, stagger them by selecting different time intervals when you get to that option (IE one at 30 minutes, one at 2 hours, etc). That isnt usually a problem for my personal account, but I run one for one of my etsy teams and have every member's blog going in, so I needed to do that with those.
Lastly, here is a blog with a series of twitter strategy posts...the author is a photographer so comes at it with an artist's perspective. The only caveat I would add with him is that he doesnt leave his politics out of his business twitter page (see my opinion about that above:), and I dont agree with all of his strategies, but over all a good reference blog for marketing artwork in general:
http://www.theartistscenter.com/2009/02/real-time-twitter-strategy/AND> can we have a list somewhere of everyone's twitter accounts so I can follow them??
Im
www.twitter.com/thyme2dream Cheers,
Karla