Twitter has over 200 million users, and works in a completely different way to Facebook. You choose to follow people, and whilst you can see what they are saying, they can only see what you are saying if they follow you back. The law of averages is that of all the accounts that you follow, at least 25% will follow back.

Make the most of the opportunities with Twitter by following these guidelines

• Register a twitter name that has your keyword search terms in it if you are a new business, as that will rank more quickly in the search engines than your own website, but be sure to clearly display your website address on your twitter profile
• Twitter is about SOCIAL media, so you will read banal comments such as “I’ve had a busy day in work” but instead of dismissing those comments, find a way to engage with them, as they open doors for conversations to start, and it is in the engagement with potential and existing customers that social media holds all of its’ power.
• Optimise your twitter profile to ensure that your profile is found for your keywords
• Consider content that might be appealing to your target market and be sure to tweet at least 4 times per day (you can use tools such as Hootsuite to schedule your tweets) – The Twitter timeline is a very noisy place, so you do need to update more often to be heard.
• Use hashtags (#) to highlight a particular word or phrase – this will help you to attract twitter followers as people on twitter watch hashtags about their areas of interest. You can create your own hashtags, and it’s as easy as putting the # sign directly in front of the word that you want to emphasise.
• Do not spam your followers – you’ll get reported as a spammer, and your account will get closed.