Are you hypnotized by the tweet of a little blue bird?

How to Build a Business Using Twitter

What is Twitter? You have begun to notice the logo of a little blue bird on everything from billboards, the bottom of your TV screen, and the bottom of ads in the magazines you read, yet you have no idea what it means. At the same time you hear the Internet and the television whisper of 5 ways to use social networking to improve your business or 10 ways to use Twitter to make money and these phrases seem to be speaking directly to you as if they were written just for you. What does it all mean, you ask yourself?

Then one day as you are walking into the local cafe with expectations of drinking five cups of coffee, eating a large over-sized cookie, and surfing job sites and Facebook on your iPad or laptop while looking wistfully out the window and wishing you could some how have a job and spend your entire day in coffee shops, perusing the shopping mall, and writing Yelp reviews of the local Thai restaurant — and then it hits you — the meaning of logo of a little blue bird on the window of the coffee shop. Above the logo it says, "Follow us on Twitter" and that's what you decide to do. You pull out your smart phone and type into the web browser "http://www.twitter.com" and you locate the profile of the coffee shop. The little blue bird is the logo of the micro-blogging site Twitter.

The Twitter web page is simple and straight forward. A large image in the background implies drinking coffee is fun and you will have many friends when you do so. The same colors that you see before you on the coffee shop menu detail the background colors, stroke colors, and font colors of the Twitter page. You recognize this as what is referred to in marketing as "branding." Beneath the coffee shop logo on the Twitter page is the street address, phone number, and web site url of the coffee shop. Beneath the logo on the coffee shop's menu is the same information AND the coffee shop's Twitter profile URL.

Also on the coffee shop's Twitter profile there is a large list of very brief sentences, or almost-sentences, containing entertaining quips and very short web URLs. These short 140-character missives are called tweets. Some of the items on the list of tweets contain the pound or hash symbol before a series of words. These are called hash-tags (a programmer's term for '#') and are used to link tweets together in search queries or simply show support for a cause. One tweet in the list even has a capital "RT" before the user name "@hashtagdeals" and a following phrase. You eventually recognize this as a "re-tweet," or re-posting of someone else's tweet by the coffee shop to their own profile. Apparently @hashtagdeals has notable tweets that interest your favorite coffee shop.

Upon reading a few of the tweets posted by the coffee shop you start to realize why and how the coffee shop is using Twitter. The coffee shop posts information that creates a favorable image of the coffee shop with it's patrons and advertises information about the coffee shop. In the most recent tweets there are links to "5 tips for making the best cup of coffee," today's lunch special offered by the coffee shop, a spinach and goat-cheese sandwich, and a link to a news article entitled, "Why that's the last drop of Folgers you should ever drink." You chuckle at this last one because you realize this is a satirization of an old TV commercial Folgers used to run.

What You Should Know about the value of Tweeting

So now you know what the little bird means and you have an idea why the coffee shop paid a silk screener to put the logo on their window. But why does the little blue bird and the notion of tweeting about business hypnotize you? This is why: for the past six months you have observed tweets about celebrities and businesses. You have listened half-conscious to news stories about celebrities such as Charlie Sheen and Conan O'brian achieving record numbers of followers on Twitter. You have seen the hash-tag #winner on t-shirts and received links in your email box to YouTube videos with #fastball in the title. You have heard news stories about businesses running social marketing campaigns. You noticed your friends posting on Facebook about National Donut Day and free donuts at Krispy Kreme. You have noticed that teenagers and twenty-somethings are constantly tweeting, yelping, checking-in on their smart phones to tell their friends what they are buying and what food they ate and it has inspired and awakened the entrepreneur inside of you with the notion that a combination of tweets, Yelp reviews, and a web site displaying your insights might draw enough traffic from your peers and followers to generate Google Adsense revenue. Or has it?

All you know at this moment is there must be a way to turn a life of tweeting into a profitable business. The only problem is you don't know how to accomplish this. You know that when you logged into Twitter to read the coffee shop's tweets that you easily and instantly created your own Twitter account, something like @MainStBusinessFan, and your first tweet was, "I'm at my favorite coffee shop and I am not drinking Folgers, LOL" … Then you checked in via Facebook so your friends would know where to meet up with you, and you posted a review for the coffee shop and how you love their custom blend cappuccino.

How to Learn the 20% You Don't Know About Tweeting-For-Profit

What you should know now is that you have just completed 80% of what it takes to make money tweeting about the things you enjoy. All you have to do is finish the other 20%. Sure you have 500 Facebook friends including your aunt's Bridge club, but how do you get these people — these assets — to follow you on Twitter and to read your web page? How do you achieve several thousand Twitter followers like the guy you went to high school with who is now playing AA professional baseball? Or, how do you get your tweets on your Facebook wall and on your website? And, most important, how do your turn your tweets into legal tender for all debts, public and private — i.e. cash!?

Here is how: Read Spilled Ink's free ebook, "How to Build a Business Using Twitter". This digital reference guide has all the insights needed to create a list of followers and create a Twitter business tweeting about the local businesses in your geographical region. It will get you started on the 20% you haven't done yet, setting up your business. And best of all, it will tell you how you can continue to visit coffee shops, the shopping mall, and restaurants and get paid for it. Good luck and this article with your friends so you can all hang out together drinking coffee and tweeting for profit.

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