It is currently suffering an ‘ongoing denial of service attack’. Which unfortunately I’ve seen too often with other services recently. Whatever your reasons for using twitter, be it personal or business I’m sure it won’t be long until it’s back up. Hopefully just a matter of hours until full service is restored.

To check for further updates you could visit: http://status.twitter.com/ . However perhaps we all should leave the service alone for a few hours to deal with the crisis, put on the kettle and get on with some work.

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First, Twitter is community based, and this means if the community likes what they see they can share (“Re-tweet”) your content with their friends. Through Re-tweeting your posts, news and content shared through Twitter can be spread through not just your friends and followers, but your follower’s followers, etc. Depending on the content of your tweet and how impressive it is (for example, breaking news or a beautiful piece of artwork), the number of Re-tweets it receives will broaden your contents impact. This also applies to things such as blog posts and articles – sharing these through Twitter is also a good way to increase your blog audience.

To demonstrate the so-called “Twitter effect”, I have screenshots of 2 different pieces of artwork I submitted yesterday around the same time to my DeviantART page. The first of these artworks I posted to Twitter, and the other I did not. The difference in hit counts after 1 hour of being submitted is large.

The piece I submitted above wasn’t linked on Twitter – instead, it was simply left to be navigated by fellow DeviantART users who watch my new pieces.

Now, this 2nd piece submitted, as you can probably tell, has quite a big difference in views compared to the un-posted piece.

Now, why is this? Well, Twitters timeline effect is similar to the “Digg effect” – where an article submitted to Digg recieves such a large number of hits that it could possibly crash the articles web server depending on the amount of traffic it receives. Twitter has the same basic effect as Digg does – the audience that your posted links and messages reach is extremely large, and this makes Twitter an invaluable marketing tool. The amount of people that your tweets can reach through search engines, Twitter’s own search tool, and the public Twitter timeline will vary depending on certain variables such as the time and day of the week and the amount of active Twitter users at the time, but regardless, the exposure your business can get through this method of marketing is monumental and, even more so since Twitter is a free service with millions of users, should be an automatic part of every bloggers, artists, freelancers and small business owners advertising arsenal.

Twitter is one of the most powerful networking and marketing tools you can use that is available for free, and I highly suggest that everyone makes use of it to leverage your business and promote your brand. The results will not disappoint!

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Scooped! the suitably named brand at makingthenews.co.uk allows you to create your own personalised newspaper to mark an occasion. Impressive enough, but why is the small business tech blog writing about this business? We’ve mentioned Scooped! before on this blog with regard to the services and software they use to manage their business. This article about the business clearly demonstrates its ability to adapt and improve it’s online presence.

There is a twitter feed which James uses to not only write personal tweets, but also to inform others of relevant news regarding his company. Not being scared to communicate and personalise his brand, you become quickly aware of not just promotions, but become better informed about James and his business.

As well as the twitter micro blog, the business has a traditional blog. In the current internet climate it is wise to utilize both types of blogs. It allows people to choose which method suits them best, thus reaching a wider audience.

Too many businesses will invest in their business and find it hard to adapt and make changes further done the line. In the large corporate and enterprise world this is because they wish to write off costs or people fail to understand the quicker pace of business and think they will look foolish. In my opinion this creates an environment that doesn’t foster the best strategies to maximize potential and grow your business.

Many in the small business world have quickly learnt that quick adjustments are often necessary. Changes need to be made quickly to improve the service or to integrate new features more seamlessly.

Scooped! has done just this, a brand new site that clearly presents the business offerings, with new features that reduce the processes from being a prospect to a client. Essentially learning what works and what doesn’t, then quickly making the right changes. Followed up by communicating this to others, coupled with a 25% promotion at the right time of year.

I highly recommend you follow Scooped! on twitter and visit their website. They are a business that are always moving forward with their online presence and many could learn from following them. Plus if you want to buy a personalized newspaper with 25% promotion currently, I would check out their site sooner rather than later!

twitter: http://twitter.com/makingthenews
web site: http://www.makingthenews.co.uk/

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Don’t speak at people, communicate with them
If you follow someone back then expect to respond to their replies if they are not offensive. People often fail to understand that good dialogue is part of business (or just being nice!) and thus should be used on twitter when possible.

People will understand you can’t respond to everyone if you have many hundreds or thousands of followers. However this isn’t the case for the majority of twitter users and some fail to understand the twitter service completely. Either not responding to people or doing so via direct messages (privately) when there was no need.

Don’t alienate people in the attempt to try and create an image. Don’t follow people back if you don’t want to respond to their replies is a good practice. It is okay if you were busy for quite a while and are late responding.
The numbers game
Don’t try and add four thousand people, send out product updates and then wonder why twitter disable your account or nobody is interested. Choose a few people to follow for a while before you start writing twitter messages. Gain a better understanding of twitter and try and widen the content you tweet when you do. Slowly choose a number of people to follow and over time a number of people will hopefully choose to follow you.

The RSS feed
Have another blog such as blogspot or wordpress? Why not grab your twitter micro blog rss feed and place it on the other blog (in a side column for instance). Visitors to your other blog will see this feed and some who use twitter may choose to follow you on twitter.

Manage your time
There is software available that will automatically notify you when people have updated, this isn’t always good. Twitter can quickly become addictive and you can get carried away very easily. Treat twitter like email, check it regularly, but don’t let it have an impact on productivity if checking during the working day or spending time with others.

To begin with, just use twitter via your browser if able. Then try software for the iphone, blackberry or desktop that provide instant updates. Only once you have learnt to manage your twitter time.

Consider how many people you actually do want to follow
Some people follow everybody back that follows them and jolly decent that is! However consider how many you actually do want to follow. When someone follows you and you are notified, read their twitter messages before making a decision.

Be careful what you tweet!
Don’t think your competitors, colleagues, family or friends are reading your tweets?

Don’t lose track of why you are using twitter and be weary of what you tweet. If you are using twitter for personal use, then don’t think someone you work with or know won’t look you up. Don’t believe others won’t discover that drunk2much is actually you if you regularly mention your company name, location and other details to identify you! Worse yet, that colleague you just complained about, might of also just read the complaint!

Be extremely weary of letting off steam on twitter. It might be inappropriate and also not truly represent yourself. A twitter comment you wrote in anger can be quickly deleted, but might already have been read by others.

Replies

Also regularly checking ‘replies’ is useful as you might receive messages from people who are not following you.

Right that is enough twitter tips from SBT. We welcome all feedback and your twitter tips.

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- Youtube
Add the following to your favourite rss feed reader (replacing keyword 1 & 2 with your actual keywords):

http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos?orderby=updated&vq=keyword1+keyword2

- Twitter
The same for twitter just add the below rss url to your feed reader and replace the keywords:

http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=keyword1+keyword2

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• That the Indian restaurant down the road had a twitter account. Then occasionally a twitter about whats hot (literally) and whats new with a promotion word that gets you a free starter etc that week, only mentioned on twitter.
• That a Spanish bar I know had a detailed list of their cocktails on a web site with descriptions and personally recommendations by previous clients or the manager. Promoted their special evenings without you having to see the poster outside (useless now as I don’t live locally). It would make each trip more fun and enjoyable.
• That the hovercraft company I use on occassion instead of the fastcat service had a desktop widget telling me the weather, risks to cancellation of service, known transport delays in the area, some useful relevant info, occasional promotion and allowed me to book within a few clicks a ticket and reserve a seat on a specific crossing.

The list could go on, what would you add to the list?

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Benefits for our readers are:

• If you don’t use a RSS readers, but do use twitter you can now easily be notified when the Small Business Tech team post a new entry.
• Submit us suggestions, products, services etc for articles and we will see what we can do.

Benefits for the Small Business Tech team are:

• Working towards enabling our readers to connect with us through their preferred services.
• Experimenting with social networks and seeing where it takes us.
• Connecting with new people and increasing the reach of the blog.
• Also enabling team members to find out about new articles via twitter.

The url is: http://twitter.com/businesstech (smallbusinesstech was too long for a username).

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