The Basics: Using Social Media for Online Sellers

In my years of speaking and writing For Dummies books, I have learned that most of us tend to be shy about admitting we don't know the basic ins and outs of new technologies. It really is OK - didn't your mother tell you there were no stupid questions? (My Mom did). There's a daily barrage of new tech stuff that I have questions about almost every day; believe me I am quick to ask to get answers. We have lives to live and there's no way we can be on top of the latest of everything!

At a recent ecommerce conference, I decided to close my talk with a bit of information on basic best practices of social media for online sellers. Even though many people in the room were already participating on Twitter and Facebook, the information was well received. Probably because we all feel good with the validation of what we think we know is really true.

In this portion of my talk, I give you the basics on how to smartly use Twitter to build your business base. Below the video you'll find a short list of Twitter commands. See you on Twitter!



Twitter Basic Commands
@username = Reply to another Twitter member
D username = Direct Message, a message to the recipient not seen in the public tweetstream
PRT = Partial Retweet or Please Retweet = a plea to other members of Twitter to spead the word and rebroadcast the tweet
RT = Retweet: used before a retweet to credit the orginal post
#followfriday = A list of recommended users to follow on Fridays. One of many themes on Twitter days.
# Hasttags are used to add context to a tweet or make your post easily searchable. A basic descirption of how to use hashtags is posted on Mahalo.