So, you’re thinking about getting on Twitter (or have just joined). I’d say good choice, but I don’t know who you are, which is the first point:
1) Don’t get bullied onto Twitter
While Facebook, in my eyes, can be useful to absolutely anyone, Twitter is a different world.
To find what Twitter has to offer might take some time. Twitter itself helps you a bit by recommending who to follow based on your interests, but you still will need to gauge who is of interest to you and follow and unfollow accordingly.
If you don’t understand why you’re on Twitter, you could quickly become one of those people who treats it as another place to have a Facebook status. If you aren’t a celebrity and think that you should tweet “I am eating a sandwich”, then you probably aren’t using Twitter to its full potential or understanding what it really is, a world of information and potential new connections.
The vast, growing network of people that you wouldn’t have access to off of Twitter, the deals and information that are easy to find therein and the news that breaks there before anywhere else make Twitter one of the main arteries of 21st century information.
But none of this matters if it doesn’t become a habit being on Twitter. You’re not going to get much use out of just having set up an account because someone you know told you that you have to.
So don’t feel like you need to be there. There are plenty of people with full, informed lives who’ve never touched it. In fact, believe it or not, generations upon generations lived without it.
2) If you want to promote something (including yourself), be careful how you do it
If you’re a celebrity: a) you aren’t reading this and b) the rules don’t apply to you. Charlie Sheen got 1,000,000 followers in less than 24 hours. As of this writing, he’s tweeted less than 300 times; I’ve tweeted over 10,000. If sheer promotion was all that got you anywhere, these numbers would likely be reversed.
If you’re not a celebrity, no offense, but no one who isn’t your friend or family member is going to instantly care about you. Which means, don’t just put links to whatever you find interesting, or even worse, just use Twitter as a means to promote your blog posts or whatever else.
This doesn’t necessarily apply to everyone. A lot of comedians that I see on Twitter are very sparsely involved. My friend @Dartanion generally tweets one joke a day, with very few interactions with his followers. At over 14,000 followers, this seems to be working for him. So, if you’re incredibly inspirational and put one quote up a day, perhaps you’ll find your niche, but I imagine you’d have to have a base somewhere else (blogs, speaking engagements) for people to find you.
If you aren’t sure what you’re going to write about, not a big deal, you just need to…
3) Be engaged
When you first get on Twitter, just follow anyone you find remotely interesting. You can always unfollow them later. (Friend Or Follow is a great tool to clean up who isn’t following you or follow the people that are.) Also, you probably are interested in building up your own followers and following other people isn’t a bad technique to get people to follow you.
As you read what people write, you have a couple ways you can respond:
1) Reply
2) Retweet
If you reply, it’s possible for them to see which tweet you replied to, in case it isn’t clear on context. You won’t have anything they originally said, unless you copy/paste it.
If you retweet straight off of Twitter itself, you can’t adjust it. Off of programs like TweetDeck (which I recommend), you can edit something before you retweet it, which is necessary if it goes over the character limit. Which is important, because you need to…
4) Keep to the character limit
Not everyone is instantly good at sticking to 140 characters. So much so that they’ve created mechanisms to have a link at the end of your overly long tweet. If you need to write that much, it shouldn’t be on Twitter. Back and forth conversations are fine, but your thoughts should not be taking up paragraphs that require people to go to off-site to read or multiple tweets for them to have to wait for. Your tweets can build off of one another, but do the best you can for them to be self-contained.
5) Get involved
Find communities. Twitter events are one way to do that. If you’re into travel, come by #TTOT (Travel Talk on Twitter), every Tuesday at 9:30 AM and PM GMT. In a Twitter event, you go on Twitter and answer a variety of questions with people all over the world. And, of course, you respond and retweet what they are saying which makes them interested in you (and potential new followers). (And make sure to check out my Guide to Twitter events if you want more info on what they are in general and how you can find ones that pertain to you.)
Once you’re involved in a Twitter community, you’ll be following various people who are engaged in their own discussions at points outside of Twitter events. If you have something to say, join in, after all, that’s why you’re there, right? To join the grand Twitter conversation.
