Using Twitter for Business--Advice From Chris Brogan

Chris Brogan is a social media advisor, President of New Marketing Labs and a New York Times best selling author. His blog (34,835 readers) and Twitter account (107,988 followers) prove that he knows what he writes about.

New Marketing Labs is "a premier digital marketing, strategy planning and social community engagement firm that builds relationships of value." Sony, Microsoft and Pepsico are just a few of their clients.

In August of 2008, he posted "50 Ideas on Using Twitter for Business" as an introductory guide. He used the words human, employees, people, community, customer service and balance in this post. This confirms my experiences that even when you are looking at a cold screen touching a plastic keyboard your goal it to reach out and connect with real, live human beings. Brogan recommends adding a picture (idea #2) to personalize your tweets.

Since I was looking for his main points, I decided to create a Wordle from his post for a visual message. As you can see, the largest (used most often) words are people, business, Tweet, others, human and helps. Of course Twitter stands out as the main focus of the text.

Brogan gives good recommendations for beginning your account. If you reread his first 10 steps, you'll see that they all pertain to building relationships and not selling products. He thinks it is important to "talk to people about THEIR interests" and "promote your employees outside-of-work stories."

Since keeping up with social media can be quite a task, Brogan wisely includes 10 ideas on maintaining your sanity. He suggests learning the URL shortening tools, allowing some tweets to go unread and tweeting in a manner that works for you.

This was a concise, but very informative post. It tells you exactly how to set up your own account and start connecting today.