How to Use Twitter to Expand Your Business

1. Use Hootsuite or TweetAdder to schedule your tweets throughout the day. Some people (like me) send tweets when they have the time and end up sending a bunch at one time. But I’ve learned it’s much better to schedule your tweets using a tool like Hootsuite or TweetAdder and send 15-20 tweets throughout the day. This way you will gain more Klout.

2. Klout is a measure of your influence in the Twittersphere. I noticed that Twitter users with more followers than followees had higher Klout scores. Some people will follow a whole bunch of people just to get them to follow them back. This is not the best strategy. The best thing to do is to follow people you are interested in following and who are important in your industry.

3. You can use Hootsuite to view several streams of Twitter results at one time. You can see your home feed in one column and see all the tweets for #travel in another column. You can also see all the tweets where you are mentioned in the third column. This helps you to manage your tweets and still keep on top of your favorite topics.

4. Hootsuite has statistics and a built in shorten link feature which is very handy. It uses the Owly plugin and also tracks how many people click on your link that you tweeted about. This is a good way to keep track of your results.

5. I’ve discovered that you can mange your other Social Media accounts all through Hootsuite. Update your social media accounts from one dashboard like your Facebook page, LinkedIn Profile, Ping.fm, Myspace, Foursquare and your Wordpress site. I added the blog feed from my Drupal blog and my new blog posts are automaticially posted to Twitter and Facebook.

6. You can also manage multiple Twitter accounts through Hootsuite. If you have one Twitter account for your personal stuff, @yourname, and another one for your small business, @yourbusinessname, and a third one for your cat or Goldy, the goldfish. Who has time to tweet for 3 different accounts? But with Hootsuite, you can do all this and more.

7. You can perform searches on Twitter.com through Hootsuite. At the top right corner, type in your search term or search word with # prefix and your search results will overlay your Twitter streams.

See my most popular newsletter introducing Twitter.com: 7 Tips on How to Use Twitter for your Business.