Twitter Tips #1

I was meeting with friends yesterday about how social media can be used in their new business. I found myself writing a rather detailed email with some follow-up points. Pasting this in here, thinking it might be useful in this form to others, and I may develop into a more full article later on.

I'd underline point that some of the detail on the social media stuff can seem overwhelming, I encourage you to not let it deter you from jumping in & trying. The more you see it as an integrated part of communicating about your business, your passion for pairings, the better it will work out.

That said, the other possible deterrent to starting on the social media (SM is the shorthand BTW) is feeling like you don't know some of the key mechanics, and I realized a few points that could use a bit of explaining. Once you get going on Twitter, an important thing to do is track who is mentioning you, i.e. they include @PairingsWF in their tweet. Generally if someone mentions you a comment back, using the "reply" function (even if it's a simple "thanks for mentioning our shop") is a good idea. So I thought I'd share a few of the basics on how this works.

-First, to see who has mentioned you, when you're logged in and are at the "Home" page (i.e. you see the stream of Tweets of people you are following), in the right-hand sidebar you'll a clickable link @pairingsWF click that, and you'll see the stream of tweets mentioning you. (granted, it will take a little time before you see much here, but there should a couple at least from me!)

-To respond to a tweet at the Twitter web interface, when you are logged in and are at the "Home" page, simply hover over the Tweet and you'll get an option to reply or retweet. The reply option starts a new tweet by you, starting with the handle of the person whom you are replying to. Then you can just compose.

Retweeting is basically sending out the message someone else has tweeted to your followers. The format is

RT @cookingchat we tasted some good wines yesterday

You are basically indicating you find the tweet interesting, useful etc, and the above format shows that it is the person you are RTing that actually made the initial comment. I'm especially inclined to retweet something that has a link to a good article or useful piece of info. You can add your own comment like this

I liked the Nebbiolo best RT @cookingchat we tasted some good wines yesterday

This shows what you are adding to the conversation, and what I said.

When using the Twitter interface, I prefer to manually do an RT (copy and paste the tweet into your new tweet window) b/c using the RT button you don't have a chance to add anything. As I mentioned, tools like Tweetdeck can be downloaded to make some of these functions a bit easier to manage.