I’ve been getting back into twitter basics again lately because so many people have been asking me how to get it right. Twitter can be a very effective tool but it does require some hard work and attention in order to gain mastery over it. Catch my previous stories here and here.
Now, here are ten tips that really do work for Twitter…
1. Follow anyone who follows you except for spammers or people who don’t abide by the courtesy rules of Twitter. Why bother when there are so many other interesting people out there?
2. Promote other people and retweet them. Before you talk about yourself, talk about someone else. Also take the time to RT someone, especially if they say something meaningful.
3. Build lists and use them to follow the most important people. These will be much more effective if you follow my advice in the last article and get a platform to manage your Twitter account.
4. Don’t be so judgemental. Someone somewhere will find your tweets rubbish and your attitude poor. Don’t judge other tweets, unless they cross a personal line, and rather just glean what you can from your stream.
5. Hashtags, if used wisely, can really be your friend. Use them to promote an event, create your own that expresses who you are, use it to develop your business. Don’t make it too long, and don’t overuse it. Like everything in Twitter, moderation is key.
6. Don’t use Twitter to spam everyone about your business or to sell. You will be unfollowed, fast. Instead, use clever tools to find your customers, talk to them directly, and promote yourself sparingly and wisely.
7. Invite friends and colleagues to join you on Twitter. Help them to get set up, help them build a network, and tweet about them to make them feel welcome.
8. Use your words wisely. You only have 140 characters, less if you use hashtags, so think short and snappy. It will hone your writing skills and ensure your tweets don’t waffle.
9. Don’t insult other people. If you wouldn’t say something to someone’s face, then don’t say it on Twitter. You never know who’s reading and what the impact will be. It ‘s also just not a good thing to do in general.
10. Enjoy yourself. Don’t force yourself to hang on every tweet. You won’t be able to keep up if you are following a lot of people so just take a breath, read for a while, and don’t get sucked in. Otherwise you’ll never get any work done.