Welcome to the second installment of my 10 part series, How to Use Twitter for Your Business.

Picking a User name

The very first part of using twitter, once you have decided to use it for your business, is registering a user name.  There are a few things to keep in mind when coming up with a user name.  First of all, you should use your real name.  Of course, you are probably not the first company with your name, so this probably won’t be the last step in your search for a user name.  If your business name itself isn’t available, then just choose anything that is close to it.  Add “Inc”, “ORG”, or “official” to the user name to diversify your search.

Don’t make your tweets protected!

If you make your tweets protected, then only those you authorize to see your tweets will see them.  You are going for public exposure here, so enabling your tweets to be protected is counterproductive to your goal.

Enable Cell updates?

Well this option is up to you. Enabling your cell for updates not only means that you can send updates to Twitter via SMS, but also anyone who directly messages you will get sent to your phone.  For large companies, you should probably think about disabling the cell updates.  Otherwise, if you are a larger company, you could get SMS messages every other minute, and that can be quite annoying.  For smaller companies, I suggest that you do turn this on and set the cell number to whoever is handling PR in you company.  This way, a PR person has the ability to respond to a direct message faster, giving your company a good reputation for PR.

Tune in next time for an advanced explanation of Twitter Settings Area, part III of X in How to Use Twitter for Your Business