Congratulations, you made it on Twitter but now what?  The first thing to do is to find people to follow because if you are Tweeting and no one is listening to you then what is the point, right?

• Click on the FIND PEOPLE link and type in a person’s name, a company name or Twitter ID.

You can also find people by using a keyword search.

• Utilize the search box on your profile and enter keywords such as your target market or keywords associated with your business.
• The search will reveal other people who have used that word in their Tweet or Bio.
• Click on their profile to view their page
• You can elect to follow them by clicking the FOLLOW button.

Here is a good plan of action for finding people to follow, this should keep you busy for a little while.

1. Locate your friends and family
2. Search for business associates
3. Search for your “competition”
   Remember that following your competition is a good thing becuase you can keep an eye on what new products or servcies they may be featuring.
4. Seek out companies
   Following local and national companies can be fun and beneficial to you because you can hear about company news instantly and even take advantage of coupons and discounts only offered to Twitter followers.  You can also send Direct Messages to these companies and get answers quickly from real people without waiting on hold!  Some of my favorite companies to follow are:
   @JetBlue
   @HomeDepot
   @WholeFoods
   @nordstrom
   @hotwire_deals
   @Overstock
   @OReturns (Overstock Returns)
   @rubbermaid
   @Sharpie
   @BestBuy
   There are a zillion more companies to follow just search for your favorite ones in the search box under the Find People link.
5. Follow News Tweets
   No need to wait for the 5 o’clock news or look it up on the web.  Get news updates instantly by following local and national news stations as well as newspapers.  Also, try digging a little deeper to find your local news anchor’s Twitter Page
   @cnnbrk
   @andersoncooper
   @ricksanchezcnn
   @foxnews
   @LaTimes
   @NYTimes

What are some of your favorite people or companies to follow?

Yes, you should use Twitter for your business and for fun.

I think that Twitter is the coolest customer service tool since the phone! Where else can a company get instant, and I mean INSTANT feedback about their product? You don’t have to find the company’s phone number or wait on hold until you can talk to a customer service person. I personally have communicated with DirecTV about how happy I am with the free Nascar HotPass this season, and yes he responded right away! I also have been known to communicate with the local news guy about a few things too. It is like direct access to these companies and we should all be taking advantage of this great technology.
Here is how to get started:

1. Sign Up. Go to http://www.twitter.com/ and sign up for a free account under you name or your company name.
2. Create a short but sweet bio and upload a pretty picture of YOU, not your dog or your pet parrakeet, just you or your company logo.
   You can create a custom background and upload it or choose one of the nifty ones provided by Twitter. I created one in photoshop and saved it as .jpg. Just remember to keep it simple.
3. Get a Twitter Desktop Management tool. Go to http://www.tweetdeck.com/ and download an awesome desktop management tool to manage all the awesome Tweeting you will be doing and receiving because Twitter is like a dorito chip, once you start with one, you can’t stop. There are some other great tools to use as well such as http://www.tweetlater.com/ where you can schedule automatic Tweets to go out on specific days at specific times and it helps manage other Twitter goodies such as keyword searches and sending out automatic direct messages.
4. Start Tweeting! You have 140 characters to work with , so keep it short. OK, so now what do you Tweet about? You can Tweet about anything you want, what you are doing, what you are going to do, comment about a show you are watching, something or someone you want to promote. During Nascar races I follow a handful of people and we all comment about the race, it is great fun. We also use hash-tag the # sign after each Tweet so we can keep track of the conversation. Not sure what a hash-tag is? Check out this YouTube video by @MariSmith – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAHitI26MmE
5. Start following people. Here are some people that I recommend following right away you will get some great content from them @MariSmith @JoeComm and me too @DawnCullo.The easy way to add people to your Tweet Stream is to follow a few people and then look at who they are following. You can also do a search for people or companies on Twitter. Some companies to follow are @DirecTV, @CNN , @Zappos to name a few. You search here http://twitter.com/invitations for people or companies. I even follow my local news stations and local traffic alerts on Twitter. I actually found out the my husbands company was going to lay off workers before he called to tell me, I heard it on Twitter!
6. Interact with people and learn the lingo.RT = ReTweet
   If you see a Tweet go by and you think it is cool you can Re-Tweet it. Just use the letters RT before the Tweet.

   @ = Responses
   If you want to respond to someone use the symbol @TheirName such as @DawnCullo before your comment. The replies will be placed in the Tweet Stream for everyone to see.

   DM = Direct Message
   You can send a private message by using letters DM before your content and it will be sent to the person in private.

   To make it easier on your self down load TweetDeck and it will automatically put all the corect letters before your special Tweets based upon the action you select when you hover your mouse over their tweet.

   This is a screen shot of TweetDeck. I have it set up in 5 columns. All Friends Tweets, Replies, Direct Message, Favorites (people’s tweets you don’t want miss) and TwitScoop, which shows the trending topics based upon the popularity of words in various Tweets.

There is so much more I could say about Twitter, I could go on for days. So check out my main resource on all things Twitter http://www.marismith.com/blog/ for some great info.
See you in the Tweet Stream.