Ok, enough of me banging on about what people say about Twitter. You just want to know how to use it and how it’s going to help your business or organisation. Here we go.

1. Join up
First things first, register. You need to upload an image, which can be your own photo or a logo. If your image is too large, you can crop it to below 300kb on www.picnik.com if you don’t have any other software.

2. Describe yourself
If you’re tweeting for business, you need to fill in your one line bio (click on settings to find it). You only have 160 characters so be concise.

I’d highly recommend putting your name in the bio, or in the ‘name’ section, if your company or organisation is your usename. In most Twitter clients, you will see the user name (eg. manchesterisace) and also the name (eg Carolyn Hughes). If you’re talking to someone it’s just nice to know who they are, if you’re trying to build client relationships.

3. Functions
To reply to someone hover your mouse under their tweet, and click on ‘reply’. You can also do this manually by typing @username in the text box. If you click on the righthand box marked ‘@username’, you will bring up a list of tweets that have been directed at you.

Direct messages are private and are all saved in the ‘direct messages’ folder. You can send someone a private message by clicking on their username and then clicking the little cog button, or by clicking your ‘direct messages’.

You can ‘re-tweet’ someone if you really like what they said and want to pass it onto your followers. This is a good way to build up good relationships with other people.

4. How to find relevant followers
Twitter is all about communicating, so to do this you need to follow people and have people follow you back.
If you follow someone they do not neccesarily need to follow you back.

One of the best and easy ideas is to find someone with similar interests to you and click on all their followers. You can also use the search function to search for key words.  In short, it’s better to develop your Twitter profile naturally and build it up over a period of time.

There are a number of websites to help you find new people to follow. Try We Follow, Twitterel or Twellow.

5. Get tweeting!
To get started just get talking and writing. Yes it might feel weird at first, and you might well be tweeting at just one or two people, but just give it a go.

If you’re a company or organisation, your objectives are likely to be:
- get your message across
- find new customers or clients
- engage with both exisiting customers/ clients in dialogue

However, remember Twitter is all about creating conversation so don’t just talk about your company or post your own website. It’s a good ideas include links to interesting news/ blog articles (use a tiny url to shorten the link), telling people what you’ve been up to and replying to other people’s comments.

Here’s some other useful articles with great great tips on top tweetings. Enjoy!

Twitter tips from Timesonline

17 ways to use Twitter by Dosh Dosh

Five tips for new Twitter users by Problogger

Carolyn Hughes is a communications and PR consultant in Manchester