#12dot free guide to day one

#12DaysofTwitter

© 2013 Reach Further 1

Sample daily guide for delegates

Welcome 12 Days of Twitter is a successful proven formula for learning Twitter and growing your network and online influence at the same time.

We hope that you will join in with the course, and know you will find much to tweet about, and build some successful relationships to help grow your business online.

This guide is the first of twelve you will receive should you choose to join the course, plus a glossary and personal Return on Investment report. We aim to make the learning practical, achievable and fun!

If you have any questions or queries, don’t hesitate to contact the Twitter team on 0113 2781800 or tweet us @reachfurther.

Happy tweeting,

@LizCable

#12DaysofTwitter


Don’t take our word for it . . .

What previous delegates on 12 Days of Twitter say:

#12DaysofTwitter


12 Days of Twitter

The definitive way to learn Twitter (on Twitter!)

Learn Twitter for Business in just half an hour a day over 12 days, with support, online chat & guidance for

three weeks. Not just the mechanics of Twitter itself, but the tools, techniques and tactics to get it working for

you and your business. This Twitter training takes place on Twitter, so you can't help but learn as you go along:

accessing the course notes and tools, following and being followed by other delegates, receiving feedback and

support as you go.

The course guides are updated daily with the best practice and examples from delegates over the past 24

hours, so you can see what’s working live as it is happening.

Just £245+VAT for 3 weeks training & support

Liz Cable, MD of Reach Further, has helped thousands of businesses to grow their client base, find new

partnerships and even sell directly to their audience on Twitter. She is in demand as a speaker and trainer,

helping businesses of all sizes establish their presence online, and will lead this course to demonstrate and

teach just how effective social networking in 140 characters can be to improve your business.

In half an hour a day, not only will you learn how to use Twitter to improve your bottom line, but you will be

actively growing your network and building your business throughout.

It's half an hour ON your business, not out of it.

You can do the half-hour at any time of day to suit you, but you should try to complete each day's activities on the day they are scheduled. If you've never used Twitter before, don't worry, we'll send you clear instructions at the start of the course. Liz and her team will be on hand to help you by phone and email as well as Twitter, should you get stuck. We also schedule regular webinars and chats to help you make the most of the learning. Soon you’ll be posting pictures, papers, surveys, audio and even video using Twitter, and reaping the benefits of a wider network of people helping you to promote your products and services.

Call 0113 2781800 –

Twitter training on Twitter Full online & telephone support 30 minutes a day for 12 days at any time to suit Supporting webinars & online chats Clear manual, instructions & guidance Helpful 12 Days of Twitter community of delegates and previous delegates to guide you Institute of IT Training accredited course provider Fantastic value for money at just £245 + VAT

#12DaysofTwitter


How to join us . . .

Each 12 days of Twitter course is active each Monday to Thursday for 3 weeks. We will be live online to support you from 9am to 5pm each day.

If you need support at any time you can either tweet our support team here on @reachfurther or @amusedbush or @Goetzy or @lizcable.

Throughout the course, when you tweet as part one of the course e-tivities, add “#12dot” to the end of your tweet. Others on the course will then be able to find and follow the conversation, as well as users who have previously completed the course and are still part of the 12 Days of Twitter community.

Course outline

Monday 4th February: Day 1: ‘Getting Dressed’ – Usernames and profiles

Tuesday 5th February: Day 2: Find and Follow

Wednesday 6th February: Day 3: What to tweet and measuring success

Thursday 7th February: Day 4: Etiquette and conversations

Monday 11th February: Day 5: Monitoring for keywords and mentions

Tuesday 12th February: Day 6: Retweets and how to get tweeted

Wednesday 13th February: Day 7: Beyond the tweet: multimedia tweeting

Thursday 14th February: Day 8: Mobile Twitter – how, why, who

Monday 18th February: Day 9: DMs, Favorites, and Advanced features

Tuesday 19th February: Day 10: Advanced Following strategies

Wednesday 20th February: Day 11: Syndicating to other platforms

Thursday 21st February: Day 12: Measurement & Return on Investment

DAY 1: Outline

#12DaysofTwitter


‘Getting Dressed’ – Usernames and profiles

Activity:

Following the instructions on pages 4 – 19:

Join Twitter

Choose an appropriate Username

Upload a Photograph

Follow @reachfurther

Create your Biography

Add your Location

Add a link to your Website

Tools:

www.mypictr.com – for editing, resizing and reformating pictures on the fly.

www.namechk.com – for discovering the availabilty of usernames across numerous social platforms.

Resources:

http:/blog.Twitter.com – All the latest Twitter news, fresh from the source.

http://www.mypictr.com/

http://www.namechk.com/

http://blog.twitter.com/

#12DaysofTwitter


How to join Twitter

Go to http://Twitter.com. Sign up to Twitter on this front page as highlighted below.

In the first box (under where it says ‘sign up’) type your full name

In the second box type your e-mail address

In the third box type a password, this can be anything you choose, but make sure it is memorable

Finally click the ‘Sign up for Twitter’ button.

You are now presented with the ‘Join Twitter’ screen, and this is where it could get a bit tricky. You need to

choose a username:

http://twitter.com/

#12DaysofTwitter


How to Choose a Username

Your username, or Twitter ID, can be a maximum of 15 characters long, however, making it as short as possible

helps it to be memorable, and also means you have more room in your tweets for your marketing message.

This is especially important when it comes to re-tweeting, which we’ll explain on Day 6.

You can change your username in the future, but it’s best to see if you can get it right first time, as it can

confuse your followers. So how do you choose a username?

Firstly, each username is unique, so Twitter won’t let you choose one which is already in use.

People relate to people better than they do to brands or company names, so if you are a self-employed

professional, or the CEO of your organisation, consider using your own name.

Avoid using numbers, hyphens and underscores as this will make it harder for people to be able to search and

find you online. It’s also almost impossible to remember.

You might also want to ensure that your social identity is consistent across all social media platforms – it makes

it easier for your customers to find you as they only have to remember one username. It also makes it easy for

search engines to aggregate your social content into one recognisable stream.

There’s a funky tool called http://namechk.com/ that allows you to test out a username and see if it’s available

across multiple platforms. They say:

“Check to see if your desired username or vanity URL is still available at dozens of popular Social Networking

and Social Bookmarking websites. Promote your brand consistently by registering a username that is still

available on the majority of the most popular sites.”

You can see that quite a few profiles on platforms including YouTube and Twitter have “FredFlintstone” as their

user name, but it's still available on Facebook and Twitpic. Once you have chosen your Username click the

‘Create my account’ button. You ideally want one that’s available on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Wordpress,

YouTube and Flickr at the least.

NOTE: Usernames are not case sensitive, but the convention is to capitalise for ease of reading.

http://namechk.com/

#12DaysofTwitter


Congratulations!

You now have your very own Twitter account.

We believe in getting dressed before going networking and inviting people to view your profile, so we’re going

to skip the next couple of steps, and come back to them when your profile has been perfected:

So...

Your welcome screen will now appear, just click ‘Next’ to get started.

1. On the Build your Timeline screen, just click the ‘Skip this step’ button at the bottom left of the page. If

the ‘skip this step’ option isn’t there (sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t!) you can click the ‘Follow’

button next to any accounts listed that you are interested in. They are often popular celebrity accounts,

but don’t worry, you can unfollow once you’ve been through these steps.

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To follow a user you select this button next to their profile

You know you have followed them as the button will have changed to blue in colour

Once you’ve followed 5 users, select ‘Next’

2. On the See who’s here screen, again ‘Skip this step’ button at the bottom of the page if the option is

there. If not, you can search for people in the search bar or look at the well-known people Twitter

suggests to follow and follow them by selecting the ‘Follow’ button next to their profile name. Once

you’ve followed 5 people just select ‘Next’ as before.

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3. On the ‘Find People You Know’ screen, click the ‘Skip’ button at the bottom of the page.

4. On the Add Character screen, click the ‘Skip’ button at the bottom left of the page. We will focus on this

section later.

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Once you’ve skipped those steps, you will be presented with the Twitter dashboard as you see it for the first

time:

In the main panel and on the left hand menu, you can see that Twitter makes some suggestions for people to

follow, often popular celebrity accounts.

Take a quick detour to your emails (the account you used to create your Twitter ID) and find your confirmation

email. Click on the link in that email to verify your account and this will ensure you can use all the features of

Twitter fully.

Once you’ve clicked on the confirmation link it will send you back to the Twitter dashboard.

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Now first of all, we recommend that you follow us, so that you can read all our tweets in your timeline. To do

this you type: @reachfurther in the box that says “Search” then press the Enter key.

This brings up a list of tweets and users, with us at the top (hopefully!):

Click on the name ‘Reach Further’ and then click on the grey [Follow] button underneath the cover image, and

it changes to a happy blue ‘Following’ button to show you are following us. When you hover on it, it becomes

an angry red ‘unfollow’ button to show that you can unfollow us. Click it a few times to see that Twitter’s quite

fast.

Make sure you leave the button looking like this. >

If you want to unfollow the users you needed to follow to set up your account just go to ‘Following’ as shown

below.

#12DaysofTwitter


From there, if you hover over the button that says ‘Following’ it will turn red and say ‘Unfollow’ then you can

click the button to unfollow that user.

You will know you have clicked it and unfollowed them as the button will be left looking like this -

If you like, you can see if any of your friends are on Twitter using the [Search] field, but we recommend waiting

to follow users until after we’ve done the next bit. . . . Perfecting your Profile.

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Who Am I?

I’m asked time and again “What do I tweet about?” Everyone is aware of the rogue tweeters who discuss what

flavour coffee they’re drinking, and other banalities of the day. We’re all agreed, we don’t want to follow these

people, and we certainly don’t want to be them. “What do I tweet about?” is a question we’ll be revisiting over

the next few days – and hopefully answering quite thoroughly.

To start with, you need to think about why you are on Twitter at all, and what you want to get out of it. Do you

know why you are here?

Do you want to follow celebrities and indulge in gossip about their private lives?

Do you want to follow breaking world news stories?

Do you want to find out what’s going on in your local music scene?

Do you want to moan about your family life and look for sympathy?

Do you want to indulge your passion for bird-watching/knitting/scuba-diving?

Do you want to find people who may be interested in doing business with you?

Twitter can be used for all of these things (though not very successfully all at the same time). So what do you

want to do with it?

On Twitter, you really do attract what you put out there, as every word you put in your profile will be used by

others to seek you out using profile searching tools, and once they have found you, to decide whether they will

follow you. So people will judge you by your profile and your tweets and will choose whether to “tune in” and

listen to more, or to walk on by.

So you need to be very clear who it is you want to attract to your profile and encourage to follow you and talk

to you, and what words you need to be using to attract them. There’s room for personality, of course, but

we’re here to put Twitter into action for business, so this is your professional persona that we want your profile

to represent.

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Your Twitter Profile:

Your Twitter Bio

On Twitter you get 160 characters (including punctuation and spaces) to describe who you are and/or who you

want to meet and/or why people should follow you. On page 14 you can see some examples – you’ll notice

that the bigger the name, the shorter the Bio. That’s because they don’t need to use keywords to get found.

But you do. Make your biography interesting and friendly, but make sure you get some keywords in there too.

Notice that there is a separate location field, so you don’t need to put geographical data in your Bio.

You’ve got 160 characters, so get creative!

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#12DaysofTwitter


#12DaysofTwitter


Your Twitter Picture

A picture says a thousand words, and as you only get 140 characters in a tweet, and 160 in a bio, your picture is

going to be a big part of your first impression on Twitter.

Research shows that 64% more people will connect with you if you have a photograph - 12% more than that if

you are smiling and making eye contact with the camera. Certainly, you don’t want the default coloured egg

that tells everyone you really don’t care:

You may think it’s more appropriate to have a logo for your profile picture, or a cartoon. Have a look at the

ones on page 14, and see what appeals to you. Who would you follow, and why? How much does the picture

influence you?

Resizing secrets

If you have a great photo or logo, but it’s the wrong size for Twitter, here’s another useful tool that will help.

Simply upload your photo to http://www.mypictr.com, and zoom in, crop and resize. You can download the

resulting perfect photo.

You need to create a square picture of about 120x120 pixels. (Ignore the fact that mypictr thinks Twitter

photos are 48x48 pixels, trust me, 120x120 will work and fill your profile photo frame.) Your picture is tiny

enough online, without making it so miniscule it’s unrecognisable.

Bearing in mind over two thirds of people who access social networks do so on a mobile or tablet device, you

need your face to be as recognisable as possible.

Ready to upload your photo?

Make sure the photo you want to use is saved on the computer you are using. Then, from the ‘Home’ page,

click “Me”:

You will then come to a page that looks like this:


#12DaysofTwitter


Click on the blue plus icon in the square above your name, and follow the instructions to upload your photo, or

“avatar”. Sometimes it takes a little while for your photo to appear on Twitter – it may stay as an egg for a

while before Twitter has caught up with itself.

You will notice you can also add a header image for your profile. This was launched in September 2012 and is

very similar in style to cover photos on Facebok timeline pages. The recommended size for this image is

152x626 pixels. Again you can use http://www.mypictr.com to crop and resize your image.

Your header photo is only seen on your profile page, unlike your profile photo which will appear in user

timelines. If you don’t have an image you feel suitable right now, don’t worry you can always come back and

add one later on.


#12DaysofTwitter


Here’s the Reach Further one:

Your Twitter Profile

From the ‘Home’ page, again if you select the settings cog icon on the top right with the small arrow adjacent

to it, you will be able to edit your profile by selecting ‘Settings.’

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Explore the other menus on the left hand panel, and then click on “Profile” as below, and fill in the details

requested:

(Hold off from connecting your Facebook account if you have one. We will come to syndication with other

social networks later in the course.)

#12DaysofTwitter


Location, Location, Location

The location field is important if your business serves a particular area.

You can put a list of towns, but you only get 30 characters in total, and naming more than one town will restrict

how easily you can be found and ranked by location specific search tools. I would consider adding UK for a UK

based company, simply to improve visibility and relevance in searches.

Website

If you don’t have a website, consider sending visitors to your LinkedIn profile instead, or perhaps your

Facebook page.

Later on, we’ll show you how you can create trackable links, and then you can see how many people click on

this link on your profile page, and you’ll be able to measure the traffic that your profiles bring you. But that’s

enough for one day. We’ll close it there and until tomorrow . . .

Happy tweeting!

@lizcable & @Goetzy

#12dot free guide to day one

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