Twitter for Your Web Business

I am a relatively new Twitter user, and although I might not be the best person to discuss the benefits of Twitter because of my limited experience, I want to share how I am using Twitter to help build my brands.   Twitter is a powerful tool that companies and people can use to promote and monitor their brands, as well as communicate with their customers.   In fact, many companies, schools, and politicians use Twitter and have a person or group whose job description involves Twitter communications.

For those people who aren’t aware of Twitter, it’s basically a rapid update service where users can enter short posts about what they are doing or what they are seeing. A perfect example illustrating Twitter’s usefulness is the day the US Air flight landed in the Hudson River.   Literally as the airplane was landing, people were adding Tweets about what they were seeing.   They also uploaded photos and videos to related sites, and several minutes before the news was reporting the accident, Twitter users knew about it – many of whom even knew it was a US Airways airplane.

How I use Twitter:

As a domain investor and domain blogger, I use the Twitter ID elliotsblog.   Most of my Twitter followers either found me by searching for my blog, seeing my initial blog post announcing my usage of Twitter, or found it through a specific keyword search.   As a result, I tend to post updates (“Tweets”) about what I am writing on my blog, what I see in the industry, breaking news related to the domain industry, and sometimes personal commentary. I feel like my blog is an extension of me, and I want my Twitter account to be an extension of my blog.   I see an increase in traffic when I post a link, and I find it’s a good way to communicate and have a conversation.

As a local online media professional with Burbank.com and Lowell.com, I’ve taken a slightly different approach in my initial days on Twitter.   The design of my Twitter accounts is an extension of their respective websites for branding purposes.   I haven’t really publicized my Twitter usage much with the sites (waiting until I am more knowledgeable and satisfied with the account look and feel), but once I am satisfied, I will add buttons on my sites to encourage people to follow my accounts.

The difference between my blog account and my local media accounts is that I have established relationships with domain investors, and I haven’t established many local relationships yet.   So in order to build my follower base on the media sites, I have been searching for specific keywords related to the cities and regions, and as I find them, I follow that particular Twitter user (assuming he isn’t simply announcing that he jut landed in Burbank).   The more Twitter users I follow, the more likely they will follow me and I will be exposed to their followers.

Just like they are able to follow my updates, I can also follow their updates.   If a major story is breaking in one of my cities, or someone writes an update about an event, I can be on top of it at the same time (or earlier) than the local media.   In fact, I learned about the Burbank Film Festival via Twitter a few days ago, and I will be adding information about it in the coming days.   This will then expose my account to the users who search for “Burbank Film Festival” on Twitter.   Perhaps they will add my account to their group of followers, and an update down the road will be of interest to them.

The exciting thing about Twitter is that I believe there are so many ways to use Twitter to meet potential clients or site visitors, find out about events, and stay on top of breaking news stories.   Twitter gives everyone a chance to be heard, and I can use it to extend the reach of my brands.

Elliot Silver
Elliot Silver
About The Author: Elliot Silver is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher of DomainInvesting.com. Elliot is also the founder and President of Top Notch Domains, LLC, a company that has closed eight figures in deals. Please read the DomainInvesting.com Terms of Use page for additional information about the publisher, website comment policy, disclosures, and conflicts of interest. Reach out to Elliot: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn

7 COMMENTS

  1. Elliot,

    search.twitter.com is nice to use to to find people near the city your site is about.

    And have a look at twitterholic.com too. You can use it to show the people with the most followers in your city/area, which might be a good indicator of whom to follow and form relationships with to spread worth of mouth about your brand. [I’ve had good results with this.]

    Hey you should try to get @burbank and @lowell twitter names, one is disabled and the other is not being used. Give it a shot.

    – Richard

  2. Another nice thing is the informal atmosphere on
    Twitter (especially between domainers).

    Since tweets are limited to 140 characters, people tend
    to dash off quick messages to each other – answering
    quick questions, often within minutes. I rarely take the
    time to e-mail or phone a domainer I don’t know, but find
    myself sending quick direct messages on Twitter and helping
    new domainers throughout the day.

    I guess at it’s best, using Twitter is like having a bunch of
    domainer friends (new and old) minimized in a small window –
    ready to help (and be helped) at a moments notice.

    DomainTweeter

  3. Another great post, Elliot! DomainTweeter, that is a good point. I’ve enjoyed communicating with a few domainers that I haven’t before. It makes the world seem a little smaller I guess. It is interesting to see the different ways in people Twitter. There is a wide variety including very casual (what I’m doing), very promotional, educational, entertaining, etc.

  4. Ugh! Thanks but no thanks.

    In our already over-stimulated, over-newsed, over-busy world, what I don’t need is to feel like I’m missing something if I don’t follow others tweets…or worse; applying pressure to myself ’cause it’s “been too long” since I sent out MY last tweet.

    This is one “puddy tat” that’ll be staying as far away from this “tweety bird” as is possible.

    If it’s not worth a phone call or at least an e-mail, it’s not important enough to be concerned about.

  5. Nice post. Twitter is the best. Congrats on selling FrenchRiviera.com, big salle. Care to say 6figures plus?? Anyway great sale, chow.

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