Creative Juices...Twitter Strategy

As most of you know, my sisters and I have started a craft blog: "Keep the CREATIVE Juices Flowing," aka Creative Juices. I mentioned it a couple times in my month of posts in September and have posted links on my Facebook account. But if you SOMEHOW have missed the news, there it is. We have five sisters contributing on one blog featuring a whole lot of craft projects. It's a super fun project to do as sisters, and these girls have come up with some awesome stuff. I'm personally trying to get ahead by setting aside specific "craft time," so I actually have something to post come my turn every Wednesday. So far that hasn't worked out so well. Usually it's Tuesday night, I get home from the gym, think about what I need to do that evening, and suddenly remember I have very limited time to step up and get crafty!

Back to the point—we are all pretty busy ladies. But working together with very part-time schedules, I think we could really see impressive progress over time. I have been involved in some amazing online media projects and have been thoroughly impressed by the great power online media has. Seriously, I'm often flabbergasted by everything I learn and experience—especially the relationships you can make. It's an amazing opportunity for any business.

So I've taken the lead on expanding our blog through other types of social media, especially Facebook and Twitter for now. I've written about Twitter a bit in the past (I think most of those posts are linked in my "Featured Posts" sidebar.) But I want to combine the basics of getting started with some basics to start networking a business—and of course building relationships. So here is some of the information and tips I've put together for my beginning tweeting sisters as part of Creative Juices official social media marketing plan.

The first 3 steps are pretty simple. (They are also more thoroughly outlined in my post "Twitter Steps 1, 2, 3") I

Step 1: Create an account and fill in all the information. Have a picture, a clear set of information and a link to your Web site.

Step 2: Start following blogs you already read and profiles that interest you, especially those related to what you do.

Step 3: Retweet. A retweet is when you pass on something that you see in your feed. Basically you are saying that information is really cool/interesting and want YOUR followers to also see it. You will usually see this as a "RT" in front of the message, although some also show it as as (via @profile) at the end of the tweet. (Again, more examples are on my Twitter Steps post.)

OK so those are the basics. I've been using Twitter for a while, so I forget about some basic things that others might not know how to do. My sister asked me today how to reply to what someone says or to let them know that you say something about them. In the Twitter world, those are called "mentions."

To mention someone, all you do is put @profilename in your tweet. So if you want to say something mentioning me at my personal Twitter account, you'd say @skariann. Simple.

If you look under Home on your account, you'll see @yourname. Click on that. You'll see every time your account has been mentioned. You can also send private direct messages.

Alrighty...those are the basics of basics. I'll go more in depth as we move on. Twitter is an AMAZING tool and there are so many ways to use it. Just check some examples at my post, "Customizing Twitter for YOU."

To get started, I'm assigning every sister to find 10 new people to follow. (We are small and don't do this full time so we are starting small...and yes, 10 is small.) However, we don't want to start following a million people (well really just 40 for the 4 active sisters) who aren't going to want to follow us back. So we want to start building a relationship with them. Either reply to or RT something these people have tweeted. If we are interested in their content and want to start building a relationship with those accounts, this will be super easy and will help us expand our network.

Lastly, observe how others tweet. There are amazing examples and amazing tweeters out there. I have been downright speechless on the fabulous things I've experienced and relationships I've created via my Twitter usage. You can learn so much simply by observing. So it's an assignment now!

Go, Tweet, Go!