A few of my friends and colleagues have recently started using Twitter. Like LinkedIn, Twitter is fast becoming a viable social media tool for business. So, for my friends who are new to Twitter, I wanted to share some interesting tricks that I’ve picked up in the few years I’ve been using it. As an aside, if you want to follow me, I’m @Cruikshank. [LINK]

Tweet from Your Cell

No, not your prison cell… Unlike Facebook, there are no apps that you can download to your phone to enable mobile tweets. If you want to tweet from the road, you have two choices: use your mobile web-browser (assuming you have a smart phone) or SMS the tweet to your account. I prefer to use SMS (text messaging) because the web interface for Twitter loads really slow on my phone. Here’s what you do to tweet from your phone (in Canada):

1. Log into your Twitter account
2. Click on the Settings tab up in the top, right-hand corner of your account
3. Click on the Devices tab at the top of this page
4. Put your phone number with in the box in the following format: +1(your area code)(your 7-digit phone number)
5. Check the box and click Save. (Don’t worry – it won’t send you txt messages unless you ask it too and if you’re not a Bell customer, it won’t work anyhow)

1. If you did it right, you should get a screen that tells you to verify your phone by sending a six digit code to the Twitter SMS number (which is 21212 in Canada)
2. After you txt the verification code to 21212 (the Canadian Twitter tweet number), refresh your Devices page to see if it’s set up. It should look like this:

1. If you really borked it up, hit the Delete and start over button.
2. If the verification code doesn’t work the first time, try re-submitting it (by txting the six-digit code to 21212) a few more times. It took 15 minutes to verify when I did it this time.
3. Once you’ve got your device verified with Twitter, you can tweet any time from your phone by texting a message to 21212.

Tweet When You’re Asleep

Using an application called Tweet Later [LINK], you can pre-schedule tweets and have them send out at a specific date/time. This obviously has applications if you’re trying to work Twitter into a marketing/communications campaign. Check it out. I could also see this having some great applications for when you’re committing adultery or playing hooky from work. This is similar to the scheduled post features in Wordpress. For example, I actually wrote this post on April 4 but scheduled it to go live on April 6.

Search Twitter for Tweets You’re Interested In

There are a number of good Twitter search engines out there but search.Twitter is probably the easiest [LINK]. Like Google, you just type a search term in and hit “Search”. Why would one do this? It helps identify thought leaders in a particular interest area. For example, I typed in Nanotechnology as a test search and it came up with some great blog posts on nanotech that I might not have found easily through Google. Google can find anything but it doesn’t highlight the most interested things – Twitter can do that. People would only tweet about an article if it was something interesting that caught their attention, right?

Run Analytics on your Tweets

I use Google Analytics to track my blog traffic. As you can see from the screen capture from my Google Analytics account (below), I got 13 hits from Twitter in the last month. I can also see that people who come to my site from Twitter are spending more time reading my site and viewing more pages. However, if you’re not in love with Google Analytics or want to try an alternative, there are services like Tweetburner [LINK] and budURL [LINK] which allow you to see who’s clicking through on what URLs from your Tweets. These services have one major advantage over Google Analytics – they’ll let you track click throughs to site that you do not have Google Analytics access to. I can easily track when people come to my own site from Twitter but what if I post a tweet with a link to someone else’s site? How do I find out how many people clicked on that link? You’d have to use Tweetburner or budURL.

Get the Equivalent of Google Alerts from Twitter

If you don’t get time to surf Twitter all day, you’re probably missing out on the latest and greatest on topics you’re interested in. Tweetbeep [LINK] has got a solution for you. I set one up to send me a daily digest of any tweets about consultants or consulting. If you were say, for example, a professional organizer, I’d set up the keyword as “organizing” or something like that. From there, it’s a simple matter of inserting yourself into the conversation or finding new leads.