Getting a handle on Twitter

Twitter can be a powerful tool for marketing and building a relationship with members of a group or customers. Every tweet is limited to 140 characters; not much space to get a powerful message across. Using tools like TinyURL and Hash Tags can improve your response and the effectiveness of  your tweets. At TinyUrl.com you  put in your URL and it gives you back a compact version that can be used in Tweets, blogs, Facebook pages, emails etc... the link in the title line is 86 characters long but using TinyUrl it's just 25 characters: TinyLink  


Hashtags or #'s are used in Twitter much like metatags on a webpage, i.e.  to indicate your tweet belongs to a family of tweets in a given category. For instance, say I'm tweeting about my store in Hampden, Maine and I want others in and around Bangor to see my tweets.... I might post something like this:

'Jewelry Artisans of #Maine, in #Hampden, is glad to represent the work of Nancy Tang, a glass artist from #Frankfort, a small town outside #Bangor'

Using Hashtags for Maine, Frankfort, Hampden and Bangor will allow these tweets to be picked up by people looking for information of those topics or places.  Many blogs and 'news' feeds use these tags to search for news to publish on their sites, blogs etc...

If you are looking at a tweet with hash tags you can click on them and see all recent tweets that also use that tag.

And that's your Fortune Cookie Tip for the week!!

~Nancy