You Too Can Tweet, Part I

Given the recent Facebook redesign, you're probably hearing a lot of yammer about Twitter. If by now you're not familiar with how Twitter can benefit your brand, walk with us as we cut through the noise and break it all down. In a recent article at the MarketingProfs site, Jim Sterne offers some great step-by-step how-to's to help you find your inner birdie. Take these first steps:

Define Your Goals. A marketing campaign's just alchemy until you know what your objectives are. Once you know what you hope to achieve on Twitter, you can better assess how to represent yourself, who to "follow," and what kind of content you want to share with the vast community of tweeters.

Target the Right People. Apart from its obvious SEO benefits, your Twitter stream's only as valuable as who's reading it. Run keyword searches on search.twitter.com for topics relevant to your brand or industry, then add influencers, evangelists, haters and interesting people that may not have heard of you to your cadre. Acknowledge them from time to time, and be sincere; they'll dig that.

Supplement blog posts by tweeting your topic du jour and promoting it with a tinyURL. Twitter marketing tool HootSuite also has a URL shorting feature that enables you to frame the page with a subtle ad.

The Po!nt: To tweet well is easier than you think. Once you match your brand and your goals to a little technology, and start linking to your current Web content, it soon becomes second nature to join the daily Twitter conversation.

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