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Almost certainly, as a contractor managing your brand you will want to be tweeting. Here we are going to run through a few of the basics that will get you and running and using social networks to benefit you.

Twitter is one of a number of social media platforms, we discussed LinkedIn here, you can use freely to market your brand. Tweets are short messages out up to 280 characters, but you can also include videos, images and links to external sources. By building a follower base, you can use Twitter to keep your audience up to date with your latest news.

Twitter works by users sending short message to their users feed. Those users can then share or like that message so that their followers also get to see the message and in turn, your brand. Therefore to gain maximum exposure you want to be creating content on Twitter that inspires an audience to share.

Creating your account

Practicalities of choosing screen name and setting up the homepage. Setting up an account is fairly straight forward, and is completed in a few simple steps. These steps will include asking people to follow you and suggesting a few ages to follow to start with. You will need an appropriate twitter image and profile picture. Your brand, photo or a showcase piece of work are all potentially good things to choose.

Building followers - building followers to listen to your messages is important. Take time to see who is already using Twitter, follow them and quiet often they will start following you back - assuming there is some connection there! This tactic rarely works with celebrity and media accounts though!

Tweeting useful content - Creating content that the audience wants to share will help you to use your followers audiences so that they too may start to follow you.

Varied content - you may start by introducing your company - describing what you do and how and where you do it. But after this it can become difficult to decide what to tweet about. You may want to think about special offers, hints and tips and industry news. Often you can simply retweet headlines with a click of a button, but you can get more mileage by adding your own thoughts so that you not only share the news but start a conversation about it. Keep your messages varied too much self promotion will turn your audience off.

Make sure you try to keep your timeline interesting by including the correct sized images alongside any messages. Images have more chance of being shared and therefore have the potential to reach a larger audience.

Other uses for your twitter account

More than a self-promotion tool, Twitter can be a sound source of information that helps you in your everyday role. Industry hints and tips, latest news etc can help you to keep up to date and more relevant in the marketing place. Simple links to industry announcements on their own can be very useful.

If you are on Twitter, it is likely that your competitors are too, and the good thing is you can see what they are up to! Using their information can help you to change your own Twitter activities, but also can give an insight into the activities of your competitors which will give you much valued intelligence to use to your advantage.

Lastly, you can use Twitter to network with people you would not normally come in to contact with. You messages can be a simple low key drip of information ready for when they need to hear more, and can also help to portray your capabilities should a contract become available. You never know who is looking at your twitter profile!

Are you using Twitter for business? We'd love for you to connect with NWM if you are, come and introduce yourself!

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