The Beginner’s Guide to Twitter
How do you use Twitter? A person I work with knows about the social media program but has almost no idea what to do.
Let’s take a look at some basics after assuming you’ve already taken these essential early steps:
Step 1: Open a Twitter account. The key here is using a name that is both unique and tells people something about what you do. Since I write about communications and my focus is on the proper use of words, my Twitter name is @wordsbydavereyn.
Step 2: Use an appropriate Twitter background. If you deal with horse rescue, a photo of a rescued horse makes a great image. An alternate is a wide-angle shot of your ranch.
The keys to effective Tweeting (the improper term I’ve heard used is “Twittering”) are:
1. Have good content while staying within the 140 character (includes spaces and punctuation) limit. If your content is boring, frequently off the subject, mundane or offensive, you will lose your audience.
2. Know when to tweet what subjects and if you are going to stray from your main topic, when to do it.
3. Tweet frequently but only when your content is interesting and how have something to say. Do not tweet just to pad your frequency statistics.
4. Follow people who have something interesting to say related to your main topic.
Having good content is far and away the most important step. People could care less where you ate lunch or shopped … unless you saw something interesting. For example, “Filled up the car with gas. One isle over, Lance Armstrong was doing the same.”
The four most common ways of tweeting are:
· Providing good original content. These are your honest comments about topics germane to your tweeting theme. Don’t talk about religion when your main purpose is saving animals.
5. Passing on comments and links from others (e.g., “retweeting”). When one of the people you follow says something your followers might like, retweet it. I use “RE RT” for the next tweet. Here I explain why I retweeted the original message.
6. Passing on links to interesting websites and comments, such as your blog. Companies such as bitly shorten lengthy addresses so you can still include a message in your tweet. If you just created a new newsletter or blog posting, include a link to it and let the “Twitterverse” know about it.
7. Tweeting photos. Twitpic and TweetPhoto automatically shrink photos then include a link to them in your post. Take a photo of your new product and get it out immediately using this method.
People are going to read your tweets when it’s convenient for them. Limit most of your business-related comments to business hours and days. If you are going to stray into personal areas or voice opinions, do it during the weekend when less people are likely to read it.
When promoting an upcoming event, start tweeting early. Give people time to attend and include links to websites providing details about it.
I lost a few followers several months ago when I dropped people who had not tweeted in one or two days. If I’m going to follow them (“following” means their comments appear on your Twitter page) I want to read their comments. People who tweet too frequently create clutter. Their important messages are lost in the spam.
If you only tweet you’ve got something to say, but get at least one post a day during the week, you’re treading a happy medium.
Following and Followers
One measure of Twitter success is the number of people who subscribe to your feed and follow you. You assume these folks take the time to read your comments.
Unfortunately, some people follow thousands of people. You know that they seldom read any of these comments.
You can avoid falling into this trap by only following people with similar interests. For example, if are involved in animal rescue, following other animal rescue sites makes sense. Following (with a business Twitter account) a sports team does not.
A good starting point for novice Twitter users is Joel Comm’s book Twitter Power and its related website. Comm covers everything mentioned in this blog post, though his approach is more about using Twitter for marketing on the Internet than anything else.
0 comments:
Post a Comment