Twitter for Business - Tania Zaetta helps a friend with Twitter business

International Aussie celebrity and Bollywood star, Tania Zaetta, was having coffee with her friend Russell the other day. Seeing as how Tania has had a lot of media experience, he asked her advice on how to promote his new book, and, more importantly, get it published.

Tania proceeded to extol the virtues of Twitter for business, citing the case of how one day I noticed she was having trouble with Telstra, and suggested she contact their Twitter channel. Not only was the problem solved, but we made an article out of the story, receiving quite a few visits to this day. She continued explaining to her friend the importance of utilising Twitter not only for personal updates, but also to help build awareness for a business website.

On the strength of that, Tania (very wisely) suggested her friend start tweeting excerpts from his book, and to get the ball rolling, she tweeted from @TaniaZaetta the following:



About 30 minutes after the two parted company, Russell called Tania with the very exciting news that MIX FM Radio, who follow Tania's tweets, checked out the link and asked him to go on air to do some interviews about the topic of the book.

Did I mention the name of the book yet? No? Sorry:

'A Superheros guide to picking up chicks'

I'm sure it will be very popular, as it's a subject close to a lot of guys' hearts.

What did Russell do after that? He rushed straight home and opened a Twitter account.

So what does this tell us about business promotion? Not a whole lot we shouldn't already know I guess - Twitter works! However, it doesn't "work" for everyone, which could simply be the way you are using it, or maybe, stating the obvious, you're not on Twitter - yet. But, if you don't have an account, how will you know what it can do for you UNLESS you give it a try?

At 140 characters (or less), it's certainly not going to take up too much of your time to find out if it can help your business! However, thee are ecrtain "rules", or "Twitterquette" you should be aware of.

Visit Tania's website at www.tania.com.au, or follow her on Twitter @TaniaZaetta

Some Twitter "rules", or Twitterquette

1) Don't constantly use self-promotion. Don't bore people with a constant flood of "see what I wrote", or see what I did, etc etc.

2) If you have a newsletter or blog, don't tweet every article or post. That's what RSS is for.

3) Don't ask (beg?) people to retweet your posts. This may be forgiven if it's something about a charity event, or a request for help, e.g. the Haiti earthquake disaster, however the chances are most people would already have received a tweet about this.

4) Try and respond to tweets directed at you, or in particular, DMs - direct messages. This of course is simply not possible if you are (e.g.) a celebrity and have 1000's of followers - all saying they love you, love your music, love your pictures, or want to have your baby etc. But if you are in business, and someone messages you directly, RESPOND!

5) Don't be too personal. Seriously, most people do not want to know you are eating breakfast. But if you must, try and make it interesting and maybe post a photo as well. "I'm just eating my porridge, and I swear the pattern it makes looks like (insert name of famous person)." Or better yet: "I'm eating breakfast with (insert name of famous person)".

6) Try and jazz up your Twitter page a bit. Of course you will have already uploaded some sort of photo of yourself, but don't use the standard Twitter background.

7) Following on from #6, DO NOT under any circumstances use a huge image file for your background image OR your profile picture. Some people just don't get it. Twitter is SUPPOSED to be "lite" - people use their mobile or cell phones to access Twitter - bandwidth is expensive - they don't want to have to download your 500 kb profile pic AND your 750 kb background image when your Twitter page loads. Don't think that just because it loads fast for you, that's how it is.

8) Finally, if you don't know, ASK!!

  

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