How to Get Started on Twitter
Twitter is very easy to set up so we've written a how to guide to help everyone get set up.
We’ve split the below into 2 parts. The first part is about setting up your Twitter account. The second is about how to Tweet and add Followers.
Part 1: How to set yourself up on Twitter
- Before you do anything thing about what you want your Twitter address to be, you need to have a unique username and one that fits with your brand. So Topshop have /Topshop_tweets, Dell have /DellOutletUK etc. This will be URL you put everywhere to encourage people to follow you. AND you’re limited to 15 characters
- Go to http://twitter.com
- Click “Sign up now”
- Fill in the boxes, including the all important username – be careful with the capitalisation
- The next page you see allows you to see if your friends are on Twitter (only works if you use one of the services on the left for your email), if you want to skip this step scroll to the bottom of that page and click “Skip this step”
- The next page suggests some people you may like to follow, if you don’t want to follow any of these people click on the box next to “select all” to unselect them all
- You’re now on your Twitter homepage, and you can start finding people to follow and asking others to follow you (see Part 2)
- It’s worth finish off the personalisation of your page first. So click on “profile” in the top nav, here you can click on the big “Photo” box and upload a photo of yourself – or your logo if you’d rather. You can upload any jpg / gif / png up to a max size of 700kb.
- Next click on “Settings” in the top nav, here you can change / set:
- Your Username
- Your Email
- Time Zone
- Your website
- A 160 word biography
- Your location
- Enable geotagging
- Language
- Oh, and delete your account. Don’t forget to click save once you’re done
- If you click on “Mobile” you can set up a phone to update your twitter from
- Things get much more interesting once you get to “Design”. Here you can change how your homepage looks. You can select one of the designs provided by Twitter, or upload your own background. Then you can change all the colours used in the central panel by clicking “Change design colours” and then selecting the colour you want for each element of the design. All the changes happen straight away – so it’s really easy to work out what looks good. But don’t forget to save once you’re done!
- To get back to your starting page just click “home” in the header – if you can’t see it click on the big white banner to make it disappear.
Part 2: How to Tweet and add Followers
Now you’re set up you need to get some people following you, and then start tweeting your news to them.
- Start advertising your twitter account to your existing customers, add a link to it from your emails (see the handy goodies that will help you do this on Twitter), and write your twitter address on any printed material (it’s twitter.com/yourusername)
- On Twitter itself you can find people to follow and many of those will follow you in return. To do this log in to Twitter and click on “Find People” in the top nav. Here you can search for specific people – or look for people who’ve put a specific word in their username. For example a search on “email” brings up lots of people who tweet about email marketing. Then click the image with the plus sign and head next to each one you want to follow. There are many Twitter apps you can use to make this process faster
- Now you’re following some people you’ll start to see their tweets appearing on your homepage. One of the easiest ways to start tweeting is to “retweet” other peoples tweets that you find interesting. To do this hover over the tweet you want to retweet, 2 options should come up in the bottom right corner of the tweet “Reply” and “Retweet”. Click “retweet” and “yes”. You’ve now tweeted! This will appear as “RT @the person you’ve retweeted’s username then their tweet”
- If you want tweet something from scratch simply write it in the box under “What’s Happening” at the top of the page (remember you can only put 140 characters!) and then click “Update”.
- If you want to reply to someone’s tweet, hover over the tweet and click reply this will put “@their username” in the box at the top of the page and you can then write the rest of the tweet before clicking “reply”
- As well as lots of Apps being available to make following easier, there are many that make tweeting easier too. Just search on Google to find what’s available and see what works for you.
If you've any queries with the above, or comments on how we could make it more useful please let us know
