Sustainable Business Twitter 101

As a new Media Company, Twitter has become an important tool for us. However, we've learned our readers have varying levels of experience with it, so I thought it would be helpful to put together a post outlining some of the ways we've found twitter to be useful, as well as some tips and lists you might find handy for the year ahead. We've also started some useful lists you might want to follow. First - We find Twitter particularly useful for a few things: 1) Tracking information about an event or conference. Looking at twitter on a daily basis may be too much work for many people. Try limiting your use to a particular event or conference. For example, the Masdar tweetup we participated in last month - this was a structured conversation you could follow simply by searching for a particular hashtag. It only lasted a couple hours, making for a dense and productive conversation. During a longer, multi day conference, Twitter is still useful by means of the same hashtag method we used during the tweet up. The main difference: at larger conferences Twitter is less of a conversation and more of a collective exercise in note taking. This is especially handy when you feel you might have missed something, a key quote for example, or the name of a presenter. You can always look through people's tweets and, odds are, find what you missed.  Take a look at tweets from the last State of Green Business forums as an example. 2) Scanning for news on a particular topic This is one of the easiest applications for twitter, and something we hope to help you with. Simply searching for keywords, like "cleantech" can yield a wealth of information, links, contacts, and news on the topic. You can also make handy lists of twitter users that tend to focus on particular subjects. Take a look at the lists we've made for you below as a handy starting point. 3) Data Mining/Brand Analysis Have you searched for your brand yet on twitter? Try it. In a nutshell it's a starting point for getting the zeitgeist about how twitter users feel about your products, company, or issue. Are people criticizing you? Praising you? What tone or language is being used? Here are a few interesting ones: FIJIWater, Starbucks, Chevron, ChevyVolt. 4) Getting word out about our posts and projects. Using twitter as a platform for your own voice is important too, and all of 3p's articles and conversations are tweeted out by our TriplePundit account as well.  If you like a story, you can click the "retweet" button at the bottom of every article and your voice will be added to the mix.  But it's generally not a good idea to completely automate your twitter feed.  We also re-tweet many articles and thoughts from the various people we follow to make our twitter interaction a lot richer and more of a real conversation. Having a hard time deciding who to follow and how to filter? We've put together a few handy twitter "lists" which collect the tweets of key people and organizations who tend to focus on some specific topics in which 3p readers have recently expressed interest. You can follow the entire list simply by clicking "follow this list" at the top of each page after checking out the links below. We've tried to filter them to include only accounts that put out a lot of news and minimum personal chatter.  We're always adding more. Please let us know via Twitter if you think something is missing - either an entire topic you'd like us to research, or an individual twitter user we should add. Here's the breakdown. Carbon Trading Cleantech Corporate Social Responsiblity (CSR) Microfinance Social Entrepreneurship/BOP Green Data Centers/IT Green Marketing Socially Responsible Investing (SRI) Green MBA Programs & Student Groups Last but not least, here's a list of all the current and many past TriplePundit writers. By now, we hope you follow TriplePundit on Twitter too!