To Tweet or not to Tweet…

Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook, Bebo, Myspace, WAYN, ecademy….. There are over 175 social networking sites listed on Wikipedia, how do you use your time most effectively and not get lost on the web spending your valuable time talking to nobody?

To help your business networking, I have compared the use of LinkedIn and Twitter.-

LinkedIn

Set up in 1997, LinkedIn has grown massively over the past 12 months. It has become an integral part of business relationships and allows users to log their relationships and to see mutual connections.

It can be used as a soft communication tool, which provides weekly updates summarising activity for all your connections, delivered to your inbox. You can easily browse other peoples friends and add them to your profile to build your connections. The site has an excellent testimonial section, whereby you can invite people to provide a short testimonial about you and your business, and provide recommendations for your connections.

Key points

  • Up to date contacts for all your connections
  • Find out and utilise mutual contacts
  • Use forums where groups can share experience and seek assistance
  • Develop relationships

Tip: Add the LinkedIn toolbar to your MS Outlook to synchronise all of your contacts with Outlook and keep them up to date. See www.linkedin.com/toolbar

Twitter

Created in 2006 and famously used by the likes of Stephen Fry and the majority of BBC radio and television presenters this has again been growing rapidly. Twitter is a social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author’s profile page and then delivered to the authors followers. An authors followers are a list of people who have decided to add the author to their list. This is often reciprocated by the author following them. Twitter does tend to be a collection of individuals and businesses either talking about their day to day lives or promoting their business or products. A persons followers are generally people who you have had none or very little contact with in day to day life.

Key points

  • Marketing – help build your brand and reach new people and not just other businesses
  • Promotion – direct web traffic, increasing exposure to your target market
  • Networking – network with others in your region / those with the same interests
  • Research – gauge others opinions and reactions by asking questions and collating the feedback

Tip: Customise your Twitter homepage to include other information about you and your business, however be warned the majority of tweets are performed using mobile phones or PDA’s whilst on the go, so will not see your homepage.

Overall conclusion

LinkedIn is a more useful social platform for maintaining contacts and building on existing relationships, allowing you to provide useful updates to everyone. It allows you to maintain your contacts database, however Twitter is a real-time active network which is very separate from LinkedIn in style and content. Twitter could be a useful way of reaching news customers and the general public at large, however it does require a significant amount of time investment and you need to consider if this time could be better spent working on the business.

And Finally…..

…..explore the free use of bit.ly links (see www.bit.ly) to shorten your website addresses, also known as URLs, as this enables you to track the volume and the referral sources of hits to websites or links which you post on either Twitter or LinkedIn.

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