How to Use Twitter

First, you need to sign up for an account; it’s free.[1] Use your real name for your Twitter name (also called a handle, a remnant from the “10-4 good buddy” CB craze of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s[2]) or possibly the name of your enterprise, although Twitter officially frowns on this. If you don’t use either, select a good username using keywords or a brandable phrase (15 character limit). Pick something related to your product category to better brand yourself as an expert.

For example, let’s say your enterprise is called XYZ Corp. If you’re relatively well-known, you’ll want to tweet as @XYZCorp. While using your enterprise’s name can be a good idea so that your stakeholders can find you, you may want to broaden your effort to reach people who haven’t heard of you, but might search for your product category on Twitter. Thus you might consider creating a Twitter account for your product category. Let’s say that XYZ Corp. makes water filters. You could create an additional Twitter account for @WaterFilters, for example.

Be sure to create your profile, which is limited to 160 characters (20 characters more than a tweet). Include information about yourself or your business, and add a picture of yourself or your logo. All this information will be publicly viewable.

Make sure you have a secure password. There have been numerous examples of bad guys taking over people’s Twitter accounts due to weak passwords. A strong password is at least eight characters long; uses upper- and lowercase letters, numbers, and punctuation; and is not a single English word.

Figure 42 — Example Twitter Settings

You’ll also want to create a background for your page. This background sits as wallpaper behind your Twitter account when others view it on the Web.

Here’s what ours looks like:

Figure 43 — Example Twitter Background Graphic

Notice that we incorporate our logo graphic both as our Twitter picture and background. We discuss the importance of consistent branding in our previous post Triangulate Your Social Media Presence. You should consider having a professional designer create your graphics for your various social media sites.