When you go on vacation, you’ll often set overall goals like: Fly to Orlando, go to Disney World, and meet Mickey Mouse. While those are wonderful goals, they don’t contain the plan for how you’re going to achieve them. You need to know what airline you’ll buy tickets through, where you’re going to rent a car, what hotel you’ll be staying in and how much it all is going to cost.

Using Twitter to grow your business is like preparing for a trip in that you need to plan out all those small details as well. While you’ll have your own goals and will need to create your own plan to meet them, here are some basic stops that you’ll definitely need to include:

1. Follow the right people.

Following your uncle’s daughter’s third cousin is not going to help you get to know people needing a virtual assistant…unless the cousin needs a VA… Instead, you should use the search function in Twitter to find potential customers and find colleagues that you can interact with.

2. Plan one month ahead.

You’ll need to fit what you’ll tweet about into your overall marketing plan. Now, that’s not to say you can’t have an impromptu conversation or help a customer with a question. But you should have an overall roadmap for where you’re going and have some tweets planned out that will advance your marketing and networking goals.

3. Automate what you can.

OK, there are some people who say you should never automate and others tell you to automate everything. As a business though, you should take a middle road. Automating DMs or sending out thousands of irrelevant tweets a day are never a good idea. But sending 1 or 2 blog updates per day and perhaps automating a couple of inspirational or helpful comments is not a bad thing. You just need to make sure you balance that with real conversations and connections.

4. Use tools to maximize your effectiveness.

Twitter tools such as Seesmic and TweetDeck can be downloaded to your computer and used to help you manage your Twitter profile – or profiles if you have more than one. Hootsuite is an online tool that does the same thing. Or you can download the Tweetie app to your iPhone and keep in touch while you’re on the road… preferably not while you’re driving.

5. Track your results.

You can pour all kinds of time and effort into Twitter – and trust me, it’s easy to do – but if you don’t know how effective those efforts are, you’re wasting your time. You’ll need to keep track of how many people are following or unfollowing you. And you’ll need to track how many people do end up at your site. Tools like Google Analytics can help you track the traffic on your site. And you can keep track of your conversations and connections in Twitter using the search functions and hashtags.

In short, just knowing where you want to go with Twitter is not enough. You need to have a detailed plan of how you’re going to achieve your goals. Once you have the plan, the only thing left to do is implement it!

In the next post we will talk about how to set up your Twitter profile properly.