1. Set specific goals/objectives. Why are you on Twitter? How do you expect it to help your company? What information are you wanting to provide to consumers? Think about these questions to help set your objectives and goals.

2. Set a budget (time and money). You or someone you’ve hired can easily get carried away and spend hours browsing through tweets and retweeting information.

3. Keep professional and personal separate. Use your business Twitter account for business-related information. If you’d like to tweet about a movie you just saw, do that on a personal account.

4. Measure followers, clicks, traffic, sales. Keep monthly or weekly statistics of these items so you can track what is working and what brings the most responses from other tweeters.

5. Set a finite time period for promotions. Tweets are accessible to consumers indefinitely, so be sure to spell out the time periods of your promotions in the tweet or in a link within it.

6. Use URL shorteners and http://. Including a url in your post allows people to easily view your website and learn more. Make sure any url you tweet is shortened and includes the http:// portion to ensure a hyperlink.

7. Photos and videos. Uploading your photos/videos to sharing sites like Flickr and YouTube will give you urls that you can use in your tweets.

8. Use contests and giveaways to entice users to become your followers or to collect information from them.

9. Use a URL you can track separately. Setup a unique url that you only promote on your social sites, to track if your efforts are paying off.

10. Maintain a consistent voice. Be sure your message is consistent no matter what marketing medium you use. Keeping your tone and persona consistent will make your campaign more effective.

1. Getting started is easy when you visit the HELP section – help.twitter.com/home

2. Lists are a convenient way to organize those you follow. When you can’t find the tweet from a client because of all your news updates from CNN, you need to utilize lists. You decide the names for your lists and whether to make each list public or private.

3. RT indicates a retweet of a post. The @Name indicates the author of the message you are sharing.

4. While you can delete a tweet, you can never truly erase it. The tweet will still exist in searches. So tweet carefully.

5. To reply or retweet a tweet, hover your mouse in the white area at the lower right of the tweet. The reply and retweet functions will show up. The retweet is just a direct retweet. You are not given the option to edit or add a comment.

6. When you reply to a Direct Message, that reply is also a Direct Message and private. A reply does not include the original post.

7. Mentions are frequently used when thanking someone for a positive post or retweet.

8. Trending Topics under the search option shows what is popular Twitter-wide.

9. When searching, think about the key words that are important to you and your business.

10. Uploading your photos/videos to sharing sites like Flickr and YouTube will give you urls that you can use in your tweets.

11. Using key words in your tweets will help people find your content.

12. Including a url in your post allows people to easily view your website and learn more.

13. Make sure any url you tweet includes the http:// portion to ensure a hyperlink.

14. Third party applications can make it much easier to monitor multiple Twitter accounts. Learn more about Third Party Applications at twitter.com/downloads