Using Twitter to Promote Your Designing Skills

Twitter is one of the social media sites that helps you to showcase your designer talents to the world. Users of Twitter communicate and interact with their contacts by sending short messages called “tweets.” It’s a simple and effective way of promoting your skills and to network with new people every day.

Twitter can also be used as a medium to gather information about the latest trends in the world of design, how your competitors are faring, the current projects that they are working on and also to build lasting professional relationships with your current and future clients.

How to optimize the power of Twitter

Twitter is a powerful tool that can significantly boost your business, provided it is used well. There are some common mistakes that many people make and this prevents them from harnessing the full power of this social media tool. The tips mentioned below will help you to avoid those mistakes and, at the same time, put you on the right path to popularize your business.

Watch and Listen. The first step towards building a successful Twitter account is to watch and listen. Follow your competitors, design gurus, professional designing companies and just about anything else that is related to your field.  Once you have a firm idea of the trends of web design and how it is used by others to promote their business, then it’s time for you to start posting your tweets and build a follower base.

Your Bio. It’s a good idea to add a picture of yourself because people want to see who you are. Also, say a little about your background and what you aspire to be.

Interesting tweets. A common mistake that many people make is talking about themselves too much. While Twitter is a forum for people to popularize their skills, doing it excessively can bore others. Instead of talking about yourself all the time, you can try to include some interesting pieces of information or links that are relevant to your line of work.

In this example, Whole Foods uses Twitter to promote its products and keep its customers updated. At the same time, they also make it interesting by providing recipes and other relevant facts. Such a kind of promotion is sure to bring more followers and this will be great for your business.

Be interactive. People like it when they are asked questions and opinions about a particular topic. Use this to your advantage and ask the right questions from your followers so that you get meaningful suggestions to the problems and confusions plaguing your mind. This is one of the best avenues available for getting opinions about your business, so do not throw it away by talking too much about yourself.

Handling the negativity. Not everyone is going to be happy about your updates and you have to be ready to accept criticism that is positive as well as negative. Some responses can be spiteful and outright heart-breaking and you should be able to look past these negative aspects. After all, everybody does not have the same opinion and not everyone will be adept in choosing the right words. So when you enter this field, accept constructive criticism and never let the negativity to take hold of you and your work.

Discipline. Twitter can be an addictive experience and it can drag you into spending a considerable part of your productive time. So, be wary of it and stick to a discipline. Make it a point to post not more than a handful of tweets each day and do not try to respond to every single response or tweet. Have a certain time of the day, preferably after work, to respond to your tweets. Alternatively, use the right Twitter clients to manage your tweets and their responses. Keep in mind the larger objective which is to be productive and have the discipline to steer away from it as and when needed.

Twitter Clients

One way to make the best use of social media is to use Twitter clients such as HootSuite, Tweetadder and Tweetdeck. With these applications you can save a lot of time and effort because you can post to multiple sites and accounts through their dashboard.

Another advantage in using these client applications is the analytics that you can get. These applications provide a whole range of different reports that will give you a better control over your social media promotion and activities. You can collaborate with your clients, employees or team members through these applications and the updates are real-time. The best part is that it can be done without sharing passwords, which makes it a convenient forum to work across different countries and time zones. Most of them even come with RSS integration and it is possible to customize your dashboard based on your preferences. Also, all these are available as mobile apps also so it’s possible to stay connected all the time.

Some of the popular ones are described below:

HootSuite

HootSuite is a popular social media application that allows its users to perform a wide range of operations. Firstly, it makes it a breeze to post tweets across multiple accounts and it even offers a secure log in for corporate customers to manage their profiles from the web and mobiles. Another vital feature is the reports that it generates for users. More than 30 different kinds of reports are generated and users can decide the parameters for each report.

Team collaboration is easy with HootSuite and users can assign tasks or work with team members and clients to complete a job. All this means that users can work with global partners and clients with a lot of ease. Scheduling updates and tracking the results of a social media campaign are possible with HootSuite and these features make it a convenient and popular way of using the power of social media to your advantage.

A screen shot of Hoot Suite shows how reports are generated. In this image the number of likes and dislikes on Facebook are shown and this will make it easy to come up with campaigns or tweets and status messages that reflect this trend. In the second example, users can control and manage their responses and work with multiple team members through HootSuite’s user interface. These are some of the advantages of using these applications to manage social media more effectively.

Tweet Adder

Tweet Adder is an automated Twitter management software that helps you manage your tweets better. With this software, multiple Twitter profiles can be maintained and updated through a common dashboard and there is no need to employ additional people to take care of this job for you. You can also automatically reply to anyone who tweets you and such prompt replies are sure to bring in more followers.

Another advantage with Tweet Adder is their search feature. You can find people and their followers by using different search criteria such as geographical location, language, keywords and bio. This software makes it easy to organize followers and you can even have a black list for people who you do not want to follow. The tweets look natural and it gives users a complete control over what is posted and when it is posted.

The screen shot below provides a glimpse into the dashboard of Tweet Adder and how it can be used to manage Twitter profiles and tweets.

In short, Twitter and other social media sites are powerful ways of promoting your skills and business and making yourself known to the outside world. However, it should be used in the right manner for the best results. The above-mentioned suggestions and applications will go a long way in ensuring that you use it well to your advantage.