The Idiots Guide to Twitter (part 2)
Ok so now you know the basics, that’s good. Gotta start somewhere. Time to add to your lesson plan. Next up, growing your followers and learning the true power of Twitter plus one big no-no.
1) Embrace the Retweet
A retweet is simply where you copy and paste someone else’s tweet with “RT @username” in front of it. The purpose of a retweet is twofold.
First, you get to associate your name with the person you are retweeting. Which is why it’s usually a good idea to retweet a big name person, or at least someone on the up and up.
Second, you build good will/twitter capital (twapital… write that down) with the person you are retweeting. This is a great way to have that big name, mentioned above, notice you and possibly start opening up their communication more to you. They’ll be more likely to respond to your replies, and possibly even retweet something of yours.
Anytime you can get a big name to even mention you it’s a big deal. Because now all of their followers will see your username, giving you free exposure to thousands of people thanks to a couple of keystrokes.
2) Learn Who To Follow
This is important. There are thousands of very powerful and important people on twitter, but honestly we only have the personal bandwidth to handle 100-200 people… at most*. So who do you pick, and where do you find out who is even on twitter to follow?
I personally use two different services for this. Guy Kawasaki’s (blog/twitter) Alltop and Kevin Rose’s (blog/twitter) WeFollow.
First both Guy and Kevin are big deals in social media, so they know what they’re doing and what works. Second, the sites are incredibly easy to use.
Alltop (link) is a website that compiles blogs and other social media lists by category. As far as twitter is concerned there are two links of importance, Twitterati and Good Tweet. Twitterati is a list of some of the top twitter users, and Good Tweet is a list of blogs that come up with great material for you to twitter about. You can (and should) also use Alltop to find the top bloggers in your areas of interest, you can then go to their blogs and see if they have twitter.
WeFollow (link) is a list of twitter users by category. The categories are arranged based on the number of followers someone has. It’s a little thin when it comes to breadth of categories but it’s new and it’s growing. You can also add yourself to the list.
* - I feel if you twitter for fun then you shouldn’t have more than 100-200 people you follow. If your twitter is your companies/organizations or you are your own brand then I highly recommend auto-following people that follow you and just using TweetDeck to separate the signal from the noise.
3) Dress Up That Profile
You may not know it, but you have a profile for twitter. It is wee but it is mighty. When I look at a twitter page that is the very first thing I notice (ok second depending on the quality of the picture). Some do’s and don’ts for profiles.
Do: Quickly and Simply explain who you are and why I should care.
Don’t: Be overly “cute” or metaphysical about who you are. Wit is fine, but you have to be good at it. Otherwise you’ll just come off as immature and trying too hard.
Do: Put your blog/website on the blog/website line.
Don’t: Put your link anywhere else in your profile. It just looks spammy.
4) Don’t Use “Text-Type”
I don’t care about your BFF Jill, neither does anyone else. If you LOL keep it to yourself and I want a youtube video as proof of you ROTFLMAO. Aside from the occasional WTF or leetspeak you should be using full words. And really if you had to click on the link for leetspeak, you shouldn’t use it, ever.
Every time I see someone write “Going 2 bed, C U all later” or something to that extent it just screams “hey look I’m hip, I’m up on how you kids speak yo”. Instead, summon your inner Hemingway to fill those 140 characters. And if you can’t say it in 140 characters then it’s not meant to be tweeted. It’s just that simple.
DON’T: Cross The Streams (link)
Don’t sync your facebook with your twitter feed. In fact, never use facebook as a compliment to twitter. It’s not. This is a relatively recent problem, but a problem none the less. I can’t believe those in charge of facebook don’t understand their own product enough to realize this.
Facebook is for connection at a distance. It’s for keeping up with the day to day events and activities of someone via pictures, relationship status updates, and wall posts. Facebook is voyeurism, Twitter is talking (sometimes to yourself).
Twitter Version: Facebook is a person’s highlight reel, Twitter is the live-game.
When I’m on Facebook I could not care less about what blog article you are reading or if your coworkers loud chewing is annoying you. I want to see you in drunk pictures, I want to see what people are saying on your wall, and that’s about it. Adding your twitter feed to facebook just clutters my newsfeed and will probably put you on my “annoying” list.
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Do yourself a favor, stay off the annoying list.
