If you’re an entrepreneur, solopreneur, freelancer, or you own a small business and you don’t like blogging, here are some steps you can take to build your profile on Twitter. It’s one way to engage with your audience that’s more interactive than blogging or emailing and doesn’t require intense writing.

1. Follow people. Find customers and clients, potential customers and clients, business partners, competitors (yes.), thought leaders in your field / industry, people you admire, companies or groups you want to partner with someday, friends, family, pancake houses. In other words follow as many people as you can who are relevant to you and your business. Everyone you follow will get a notice telling them that you’re following them.
2. Carve out five – ten minutes in your day to check what’s going on with the people you’re following. When you see something you would have said, retweet, or if you see something you like, fav it. If you find something interesting or have a comment about something someone else tweeted (and you don’t mind it being public on the internets), respond.

These two things really make up half the battle. The best thing is if you just follow others and retweet / fav / respond you’re building engagement without tweeting anything yourself. But chances are if you follow people, people are going to follow you. And once you start building engagement you’re going to have some things to say…

1. If your business relies heavily on dates / schedules (fitness studio or gym, for example) time your tweets to coincide with this schedule. If you have a big event coming up, consider telling your followers about important milestone dates leading up to the event (space or performers booked, sponsorships, etc.). Put all this in a calendar, if that makes things easier.
2. Following that, tweet about your events! Sales, classes, talks, special appearances by celebrities, even personal things like graduating from school, finishing a program or taking a trip to attend a conference.
3. Share stuff. Yes, there’s a lot of “noise” out there. A lot of people saying a lot of stuff about a lot of different things. But this doesn’t mean no one wants to hear what you have to say. Share things you find online, things you overheard or events that might be of interest to your followers.
4. Share YOUR stuff. Take a picture of a new product your company is developing, a new shipment of clothing or accessories to your store, something cool happening right in front of you. Maybe you own a fitness studio and someone in your class is mastering a move for the first time. Get their permission to send a photo out to the universe and share it.

As with anything else, you determine how much (or little) you’ll get out of using Twitter. I’ve been on it for a couple of years and I know I can do a better job of being more engaged. But that’s the great thing about it – it’s easy and quick to join the conversation when you’re ready.