Even though we've mentioned Twitter many times in other training, we've never specifically given you strategies to use it as a business tool.
We will admit the concept of Twitter is strange. Why would someone want to post a 140 character note to the internet for eternity? The answer is simply that the system was created for friends to share their instant messaging status updates with other friends. In fact, AOL Instant Messenger was the inspiration for the Twitter system.
High school and college students loved it practically overnight and people with way too much time on their hands and way too many friends all flocked to get accounts.
Of course, you can never simply have a useless technology stay useless, so business people and technology gurus also flocked to figure out how to make money using this new tool.
Over the next few days, we will give you some twittering ideas. If you don't already have an account, you should create one now by simply going to twitter.com. You could pick your real name, your store name, or something cute and silly. Whatever you decide, make sure it's easy to remember and don't leave out any letters. For example, don't call yourself "BobsJLRY," instead just call yourself "BobsJewelry" so people don't have to remember your abbreviations.
Once you have that set up, you should look in the Profile area of your Twitter account and attach your cell phone so you can send text messages into the system. This step will make your life easier in the long run because you don't need to be at a computer to send a tweet.
Oh, yes, in case you didn't know; the Twitter messages are limited to 140 characters long in order to support all of the text messaging systems in the USA. These 140 messages are called "tweets."
Odds are that you will rarely send your tweets from a real computer. There are hundreds of program available now that will allow you to send tweets from smart cell phones, various programs, Facebook and many other internet sites.
However, people will visit Twitter.com for searches. In other words, people will casually use twitter to search for topics, like "wedding rings." Another popular feature of Twitter is to view all the tweets that are within some proximity of your current location. When someone "tweets" using their cell phone, the longitude and latitude is immediately associated with the message, so that in the future anyone else can literally see all previous tweets around them.
It's like seeing ghost messages from ages past; quite eerie actually.
We're not going to get into the details of how your customers are viewing the tweets because there are too many options. For now, we want you to simply get started using the system.
Sign up. Set up the text messaging feature. Download the Twitter app to your cell phone. Send your first tweet.
What should you say? Perhaps start with this "We have a great selection of #wedding #rings that just arrived." The # is not a typo, that's a feature within Twitter that we're going to wait until tomorrow to explain.
