Promoting on Twitter
You’ve probably heard about Twitter. It’s basically a microblogging site, and is getting pretty popular among some people. It’s a lot of little posts, all of them under 140 characters, and there are millions of people using it. I don’t have a strong opinion either way on Twitter—I like it, but I’m not a power user. I think it partly depends on what audience you’re trying to reach, and whether you yourself like Twitter.
One way to connect to Twitter is discussed later—you can connect Twitter to Facebook, so that when you make posts on Facebook, they automatically appear on Twitter. This is nice, because then you don’t have to ever even log into Twitter if you don’t want to.
To get started, visit Twitter.com and sign up:
(If you’re just getting started with social networking, there are a couple chapters on Twitter that you might find helpful in the book Social Networking Spaces at http://tinyurl.com/snspacesbook. Overall, even if you don’t see yourself as a power user, it probably is worth investigating and having some kind of presence on it.)
Business Twitter
If you want to make a separate Twitter account for your site, like a business Twitter account, you can use your personal email address, but you might also be interested in creating a separate Gmail address for that Twitter account. To do so, visit http://mail.google.com and create a new Gmail address. Then you can always go into Settings > Forwarding and have that Gmail forwarded to your regular email if you’d like.
Here’s a sample Twitter account, which Mark Neal created for RGBGreen:
So as part of a kind of his social media management for CFTW (a non-profit organization I started, which is comprised of RGBGreen and other projects), Mark created the RGBGreen Twitter page, and has made various kinds of posts.
Mark did connect the RGBGreen Facebook Page to Twitter, and we could have left it at that. But he’s taken it a little further, made additional posts on Twitter, and has gotten to know some of the “followers” of the RGBGreen Twitter account. So, consequently, Mark has actively followed others and exchanged messages with them.
So if you like, you could just post on Twitter. But depending on your time/resources/goals, you might like to get more active in social media promotion.