This article was published on May 21, 2012

Twitter releases small business guide tailored to the British audience


Twitter releases small business guide tailored to the British audience

Twitter has just celebrated its first year anniversary for its London office with impressive stats including 10m active users in the UK. To further support for its British users, the microblogging service has released a UK Small Business Guide with advice for use and examples of past success.

There is already an existing US guide for small businesses that appeared earlier this year and this new edition is more closely aligned with the UK audience. Oddly, the guide appears to carry the hashtag #LDNlocal too. Though this may be a reflection of where Twitter’s offices are located in the UK, it’s not terribly inclusive for the rest of the nation.

The guide itself is downloadable as a PDF. Be sure to make your location clear to ensure that you get the right edition. Twitter name, email and business registration details are required to get your paws on a copy.

The introduction to the guide goes through the example of @BigGreenBooks, the business that needed a boost from customers and sent out a tweet that saved the shop. You can read more about this on the Twitter UK blog. It’s a good case study which shows how local businesses can leverage their communities through short form communication.

Naturally the rest of the guide provides a walk-though on how to create accounts, what to say and where to start approaching twitter for business.

Though the personal touch is what makes businesses popular on Twitter, (that or free beer) there are differences between personal accounts and business accounts that should be acknowledged. This document helps to set that out clearly as well as providing some handy stats to back up the instructions.

Most habitual and long-time users of Twitter might not find all of the information entirely novel. But then those uses will have become accustomed to the service through its various iterations and changes.

Coming to Twitter with a business as an untrained user can be daunting; it’s one thing to tweet out a garbled message from your own account but many small business need to nurture growth based on their reputation, so they want to get things right.

This guide is a fair starter kit for people hoping to become more familiar with the service. Before they know it, there could be an army of followers checking out multimedia posts and dropping in to local businesses based on the short form updates that arrive on their screens every day.

If you are new to the Twitter world and want to join the many companies that have found success on the platform, or if you think you know it all but fancy a different look at the way things run, download the guide and remind yourself why we’re all still updating in the digital stream.

The Twitter Small Business Guide UK edition

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