Posts Tagged ‘twitter’

If you’ve ever failed to understand why people Twitter, this video does a great job of explaining the concept:

So now you’ve watched the video and understand the concept, how do you get started?  Here’s how:

1. Upload your Bio and a photo.  People will not follow you unless you provide a little information about who you are and what you do
2. If you don’t wish to use Twitter to follow a bunch of celebrities.  Use your head, and not a tool to locate people to follow.  Either use the Twitter search to locate people wh0 talk about topics that matter to you, or visit some of your favourite websites to locate twitter profile links
3. Introduce yourself to the people you have followed.  To write a tweet that appears in a Twitter specific users timeline simply reference that user by name.  For example, “Hi @simonswords, great to see you on Twitter!”
4. Check out the people you have followed to see who they follow.  Chances are they will follow people whom you will find of interest
5. Once you begin to build a group of followers engage with them.  Always try to respond to their tweets that are directed at you and post relevant interesting links from time to time.  Do this by re-tweeting (RT for short) or acknowledging somebody using their username with an @ symbol at the start.
6. Last but definitely not least, take time t0 clean up the list of people you currently follow.  If you don’t do this on a regular basis you’ll find your Twitter feed becomes full of useless information

There are also a few basic things you should not do:

1. Don’t steal other people’s tweets and try to pass them off as your own.  Chances are you’ll get found out and blocked
2. Don’t automatically follow people that follow you.  Especially if a user has followed you and their follow to followed ratio is high (i.e. they follow 10,000 people but are only followed 10!)
3. Don’t repeat yourself, which can be broken down into three categories:
   a.  Don’t start each day by positing “Good morning fellow Tweeps!”.
   b.  Commenting on live TV, we can all turn on the TV if we wish to find out what’s happening at Wimbledon for example
   c.  Posting “I’m bored”, “Meh”, or some other useless tweet that adds no value to what I can see in my feed

Twitter is a simple service but it will add value to your business and life if you use it properly.  I look forward to seeing you there!