5 Ways to be an Awesome Twitter User

As a way of kicking off Social Media Rules, I thought I’d start by look at my 5 top tips for making the most out of one of the internet most powerful social media platforms, Twitter

Here are my 5 tips for getting the most out of Twitter.

(note: This is actually a rework of a post I wrote recently for The Smashing Business Blog, a blog about making the most of online business, but it’s so relevent to the casual Twitter user that it’s worth being my first post.)

1. Join the Conversation

For me, this is one of the big things that people new to Twitter miss. Twitter is a conversation and as in any conversation there needs to be a dialogue. Conversations aren’t much fun or of much interest when only one person talks. If you see something on Twitter that’s of interest, whether you agree or disagree with it, then reply to it or retweet it. Join the conversation. Use Twitter as a discussion tool not just a soap box.

2. Don’t be a Spammer!

Personally, as an active Twitter user, there’s nothing more annoying to me than someone repeatedly pushing out spam; we sell this, we sell that, we’re great buy from us. It’s so unbelievably annoying and I usually unfollow them straight away. If you’re using Twitter to simply sell you’re products then you’ve probably chosen the wrong medium in which to do so, to be honest.

You need to balance your need or want to talk with the need to engage with your followers. Granted they’d like to know if the company you may work for has some amazing deals or special offers but they’d also like to know about you and what you’re doing. @ebuyerdotcom are at this. They tweet about their deals and new products sure but they also tweet about their blog posts and especially their Cake and Cookie Fridays, where they offer up great recipes for tasty treats. Try to use some creativity with your Twitter Feed and have fun.

3. Follow to be followed

I found this out to my own expense about 6 months ago when I’d gotten stuck on around 100 followers and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t work out why my numbers wouldn’t change, then a friend of my pointed out the problem. I was unable to attract people to follow me because I was only following a handful of people myself. People were having the courtesy to follow me but I didn’t have the courtesy to follow them back. If you’re a big, well known brand like Virgin or the BBC then you can attract 100,000’s followers without ever having to follow them back but if, like me, you’re a small fish in a very large pond you need to follow people to be followed.

4. Using 3rd Party Apps

There’s nothing more sapping to your productivity at work than checking your Twitter profile every 5 minutes to see what your followers are up to. If you do that you’ll never get any real work done so you need to use applications that can better track your followers. There are quite a few, just check out these apps and you’ll see what I mean. My personal favourite is TweetDeck. Its customable features are great. You can set up columns for many of your Twitter accounts as you want; business or personal. Personal on my TweetDeck I have a column of just my favourite people that I follow, my mentions, and my Facebook news Feed. I get notifications on my desktop when any of those update and can then view them when I have the time.

5. Hold back the flood

There can be loads of excitement when you initially join a social network like Twitter but that enthusiasm can boil over if you don’t discipline yourself and you can find that you are posting updates every  5mins. If you’re flooding the public timeline with that much content then, yes you will get noticed, but will you get noticed for the right reasons? Most likely not. Most likely you be disregarded by the actual people you’re trying to communicate with. Rather than posting out everything you can think of, at any given moment, try to hold back and only post the real quality and your followers will appreciate you more.

Advertisement