How to unleash the power of Twitter - what we've learned

Until we started Talented Ladies Club, Twitter was a complete unknown to us. And if we're honest, we saw it as much more of a personal social medium than a useful (and powerful) business tool.

But as we try and help working mums find a way to make social media work for them, we felt that we should practice what we preach and open an official Talented Ladies Club account.

So we did and, well... we didn't so much really. We'd occasionally post links to our latest articles, and halfheartedly find people to follow, in the hope they'd follow us back. In the early days we were excited to get to 10, then 11, then, 12 followers. Getting to a heady number like 200 seemed like an impossible dream.

Then one day, while scouring our Google Alerts for interesting stories we saw something about Jacqueline Gold's #WOW competition in which she picks three female-run business to promote on Twitter every Wednesday. It seemed a great idea and we were determined to win - as we did the very first week we entered!

Excited about this new idea of Twitter competitions, we then searched for more, and found Theo Paphitis' #SBS. We also spotted that lots of people seemed to be tweeting about something called #purplebiz - a retweeting competition held daily.

#purplebiz is run by a company called The Purple Dog Network who, as well as their free Twitter contest, provide a range of packages to help businesses unleash the power of Twitter. By this point we knew enough about Twitter to realise that we knew practically nothing! And we decided to hire Purple Dog's services.

And here we are. We've had one 'lesson' already from Purple Dog (a 40 minute enlightening phone call) and are amazed at how much we didn't know about good Twitter etiquette. Like lots of people we had felt quite shy about venturing onto Twitter. When you tweet as a person, to people you know, it's easy to just be yourself on Twitter. But when you're tweeting as a business, to lots of businesses and people you don't know (and who don't know you) how do you act? What do you say? What should your personality be?

Now we feel much more confident about tweeting. Understanding the ratio of tweets (as a quick guide, you should tweet four times as many thanks and retweets that help others, than you should post personal, self-serving tweets) really helps, as does knowing where to find our mentions (in Connect) so we can acknowledge anyone nice enough to mention or retweet us.

To date, we're 6 followers short of 300 (if you fancy helping us reach the magic 300, you can follow us here) and are really excited about putting all our new knowledge about Twitter to good use, and enjoying meeting lots of lovely people. We look forward to chatting with you there, too!