You Should Be On Twitter All Day Long
How much time should you spend on Twitter? This is a question I get all the time. Think about how much time you spend on email? All day right? You turn on your email client in the morning as soon as you boot up your computer and leave it on until you shut down and leave for home (and for some of you…you continue emailing on your phone while on the road!)
Why do you think Twitter would be any different? In fact, I want to go on record and state that I think you should be Twittering all day long and cut back on your emailing to compensate for the time you’ll spend Twittering.
With Twitter, you can build relationships with relevant, qualified, and if you are lucky, highly influential strangers in real time. Can you do that with email (and I’m not talking about email lists, I’m taking about your regular daily email program)?
Here is how I incorporate Twitter into my daily work life. In the morning, when I turn on my computer, I open up my email program and TweetDeck, my application of choice for using Twitter.
Both apps remain open in the background all day long, as I do my daily work, which consists of editing videos, web development, creating marketing strategies for people, producing webinars, and a million other new media related projects.
As my day progresses, and I come up with a cool tip to share with the world on Twitter, I CMD+TAB (ALT+TAB on Windows) to my TweetDeck application and type in a quick tip on Twitter. Then I CMD+TAB back to my application that I was working on. It’s that simple.
I do this all day long and share tips on Final Cut Pro (my application of choice for editing videos), tips on Social Networking, tips on producing webinars, tell the world when we published new videos, announce new webinars, plus anything else I think people in the Twitterverse will find interesting.
Three times a day (morning, afternoon and before I leave work), I also take 15 minutes to look for interesting posts, not only from the people that I’m following, but also from relevant strangers in Twitter. I do this by creating search columns in TweetDeck based on keywords that are relevant to what I do and services I offer. I then try to reach out and start relationships with those potential leads.
It’s that simple. Is Twitter time consuming? You bet it is. It’s as time consuming as the emailing you do all day long and can’t think of living without. The question is not if you should spend time on Twitter or not, the real question is how serious are you about using Twitter as a real business tool to gather new leads. Change the way you think about Twitter and you will find great business success with it.
By the way, if you want to follow me, you can find me at Twitter.com/NewMediaDude.
Posted in New Media, Social Networking, Twitter, eMarketing - 7 Comments »
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Hi, Marcelo!
How many people do you follow on twitter and do I understand correctly that you don’t really read each and all of their twits, you just scan for “interesting stuff,” which appears to be mostly leads for people that might be interested in your services and you do this through the search function spending 45 minutes/day at it.
As you describe it, a much larger amount of your time seems to be spent on what appears to be largely self-promotion that you also hope would be interesting to people (*could* be … although if you do it largely to promote yourself at least some people might regard it as spam).
Delia
P.S. I truly don’t get it how could people truthfully follow literally thousands of people on twitter (some of them, *tens* of thousands) without doing little else.
P.P.S. Also, I can’t see how you could possibly form a meaningful relationship on Twitter (way too restraining) — it seems to me you’d have to take it to email and/or phone at some point and eventually meet in person, unless all you mean by “relationship” is getting people to try your services. D.
Great tips, Marcelo. Thank you for breaking twitter usage down into real-world specifics. And I love Final Cut Pro too.
Delia, great points. First of all, when you are following more then 100 people, you really start to just glance at stuff. In TweetDeck, there is also a function in each column to let you search for specific keywords.
When I talk about “relationships”, I’m talking about business relationships with people that ultimately want my services. For personal relationships, it’s offline and real face to face. That’s how I do it. But if you want to reach thousands of people with your message, Twitter is a great way to do it.
re: spending all my time only putting stuff about my business. You can think of it that way, but most of the time, I just post tips on various things. They all have to do with what I do and love, but that attracts people that love the same thing (e.g. Final Cut Pro editing). Through those free and valuable tips, I start building these relationships with people that enjoy what I enjoy and hopefully, turn them into clients in the future.
Marcello: fair enough!
Delia
P.S. tried to find you on twitter; still don’t know how
many people you follow — nothing came up under your name or the name of the website (strange for someone who wants to reach a whole lot of people…) D.
Good call! I forgot to add my Twitter in my blog entry. I go by “@newmediadude”. Follow me and I’ll search for interesting keywords in your tweets
Cheers!
thanks for the invitation, Marcelo! but now that I know how you operate … I know you will find my interesting tweets, whether I follow you or not! *lol*
Delia
P.S. take care!:) D.
This is great info, Marcelo. It’s good to hear how someone else keeps up with Twitter and content that interests them. I haven’t been using Tweetdeck but I am going to give it a try. Speaking of Twitter, I’ll definitely add you to my follow list.
Thanks,
Shani
@ShaniSammons