I’ve been experimenting across a number of Twitter accounts lately, and I’ve come up with some guidance that I hope will help you be a better user of Twitter. I define success in this field as attracting a large number of followers who actually do follow you, click your links, and want to engage with you further.
Don’t Answer “The Question”
The first thing you see on your Twitter page is the question, “What are you doing?” If you want to excel at Twitter, you need to ignore it. People don’t care what you’re doing. I’ll leave the “making a sandwich” example to other bloggers, and you need to leave the “making a sandwich” tweets to other Twitter users.
Let’s face it; social media is pure, unvarnished human selfishness. It’s all about the self-centered life of the person reading your tweets, not you.
Tweet GOOD STUFF
On a related note, pick a few subjects to tweet about and tweet interesting, relevant, informative things about them. Post links to blogs, news articles, etc. Try to think of what your audience wants to read about, and deliver it. Use Google Reader to compile a list of related blogs and news items that are relevant to your subjects. Pick the best stuff every day and tweet it.
Be a RT’er to the STARS
Follow the most interesting and well-followed people in your subject areas and re-tweet them from time to time. With luck, they’ll thank you and their audience will see your name mentioned! They’ll often remember you and repay the favor later on.
Leave room for the RT
Don’t use all 140 allotted characters for your tweets. Calculate how many characters it will take for someone to type “RT @yourtwitterusernamehere ” and subtract that number from 140. That is your personal character limit. This way, it will be easier to re-tweet your stuff.
Search & Follow
Search at search.twitter.com for your core topic(s) and follow the people who use those keywords. Especially if they use your keywords or topics in their username.
Schedule Your Tweets
Nobody who uses Twitter well and often uses the regular Twitter interface. I recommend that you sign up with HootSuite. It’s free, and will allow you to manage your Twitter account much more efficiently. The main attraction of HootSuite, for me, is the ability to schedule your tweets. This will allow you to set aside 20 minutes in the morning to schedule all your tweets for the day.
Forget the Crap Software!
There are lots of gimmicks out there that will claim the ability to garner you hundreds or even thousands of Twitter followers in a short amount of time. Avoid them like the plague. You will quickly be labelled a spammer and possibly booted from Twitter. Even if that doesn’t happen, people will not be attracted to you.
{ 2 comments }
