To continue with our series on social media, a very popular social media outlet is Twitter. If you haven’t heard of Twitter, then this is a great place to learn a little about this wildly popular and easy-to-use service for growing your network and your business.
What is Twitter?
A real-time, short messaging service, Twitter works over multiple networks and devices, enabling its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Twitter allows colleagues, business associates, friends and family to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to a simple question: What are you doing? As simple as it sounds, its reach is extensive and it can serve as an incredibly rich vehicle for disseminating information, given its ability to connect with people across a wide array of interests, geographies and time zones from your desktop, mobile phone or other PDA – as long as you can keep each communication to 140 characters (with spaces).
To find out how to set up an account and get started, take a look at our previous LicenseStream Insight blog posting. Once you're set up, be sure to populate your Twitter account with tweets on an ongoing basis - three a day is a good place to start if you have the time, including one at the start of business, a second during the lunch hour, and a third at the close of business.
After you’ve added several tweets, start following people. If they find what you are tweeting about helpful or interesting they'll follow you. A good way to find people to follow is to visit http://search.twitter.com/ and type in a few keywords that relate to your creative work. For example, if you specialize in images of Western shorebirds, then simply type in like ""professional photographer or “Bird photographers.” To find like-minded LicenseStream users, try following the LicenseStream or ImageSpan Twitter streams. After you start to follow interesting news and people related to your work, you'll build up a following in no time.
What do you Tweet about and how do you incorporate your keywords into your tweets?
Tweets can be anything that you think will add value to the people who follow you. Your blog would be a good thing to tweet about. It can be something as simple as, "I just published a new blog post about licensing dog photography” with a link back to your post. Since you’re limited to 140 characters, you’ll want to use a shortened URL (try one of the services for shortening URLs such as bit.ly (link= http://bit.ly/ or Tiny URL (link= http://www.tiny.cc/). Alternatively, you can tweet about one of your images, incorporating keywords that relate to your business, and simply add a link to your LicenseStream gallery to your tweet.
The best way to build relationships is to be helpful to your Twitter following. So share a helpful photographic tip or trick, or provide a link to an article of interest to your followers. Share your passion for your work by alerting them to a new photography exhibit, a book about photographic techniques, or another photographer you admire. Again, think about including keywords that relate directly to your business or specialty. You may find your Twitter stream, if not your Web site, promoted in turn. With a built-in limit of 140 characters, no single tweet has to be overly complicated.
Twitter is more of a conversational medium than a blog, so you’ll be more successful if you monitor and add value on a regular basis. You'll find responding to people and posting new tweets to be a relatively quick process and one that is very addictive.
Twitter’s conversational style also lends itself to some provocative dialogue. In some cases, you may directly or indirectly solicit honest feedback about your ideas or your work. When appropriate, take the initiative to respond in a positive, thoughtful way to Tweets that may be negative or potentially harmful to your business. Just remember that because of the speed with which tweets can be deployed and Twitter’s highly viral nature, Twitter should be used with caution. So you may want to think twice before blasting a rival or other offending entity with a blistering tweet.
Used prudently, Twitter provides a great service for fostering relationships with other photographers, customers and highly-qualified potential customers. As we’ve highlighted, your tweets can help build your search engine ranking by directing link backs to your site. Such linkbacks also increase page views for your online gallery. All these benefits build your business and increase your capacity for making money from your images.
