Using Twitter for Marketing & PR - A Step-by-Step Guide

Notice how we've added a specific "hashtag" (#transform) to help us track when this content gets retweeted or shared.

 

1. Sign-up and post a profile.  Visit Twitter and click on the "Get Started - Join" button in the middle.  The rest is simple enough that I think you can figure it out without my help.
2. Write some updates.  The beauty of Twitter is that the 140 character limit is the great equalizer - I am about as good of a writer as Shakespeare on Twitter.  Post a link to a news article you liked with a one line comment, mention an interesting thought you had, or tell everyone what you are cooking for dinner.  Just write something.
3. Make friends.  Making friends on Twitter is pretty easy.  Just surf around the web on your favorite blogs, people's Facebook profiles etc, and when you see a Twitter box that tells you what they are doing click on it.  That will bring you to their profile and then you just click on the "Follow" button on the top left and you are now following them.  Most of the time they will then follow you back, and the audience for your 140 character insights will have grown by one person.  You can get started by following me: chris martin on Twitter or parth sharma on twitter.  You can also click on the people that other people are following to find more people to follow.
4. How to post URLs.  Twitter is based on 140 character updates.  If you have a really long URL, that doesn't leave much room for  Most people on Twitter use www.TinyURL.com to take a long URL and make it short.  Give it a shot if you have a long URL that you want to market on Twitter.
5. Monitor conversations about your company.  Even if you don't join Twitter yourself you can monitor what people are saying about any person, company or brand.  This is quite useful from a marketing and PR standpoint.  Twitter has a search engine that lets you do just this.  For instance, here is a list of everyone who is talking about HubSpot on Twitter.  You can subscribe to these searches by RSS to keep yourself updated.  Another tip is that you can "follow" all the people you find talking about your company (just click on their username to go to their profile).  If they are talking about your company, they would probably be pretty happy that someone from the company wants to follow them.
6. How to "chat".  Using the @ symbol before someone's Twitter username is how people have "conversations" in Twitter.  This makes their username a link to their profile so other people can follow the conversation (sort of).  For example if you wrote "@linkwheelpro thanks for the cool blog article about Twitter today" that would be a way of telling me you liked this article. Try it out.  It's not IM (instant messaging), but it is sort of like a publicly broadcast IM service.