Five Learn-by-Doing Lessons on Twitter
Whenever I mention Twitter, someone is bound to say, “I just don’t get it!” Well, the truth is, that when I started using Twitter, I didn’t get it either. It took me weeks of playing around with it to start to see value. And, although I think that for any new Twitter-er there is a learning curve, here are some things that I learned through experimentation (established tweeple might learn something too!):
1. Set up a good profile. If you don’t explain who you are or what you do in your profile, it will be harder for people to find you. Also, when someone who doesn’t have a profile description follows me, I’m much less likely to follow them back.
2. Don’t go it alone. Especially at the beginning, I loved seeing tweets from people I actually knew in real life — it eased me into the concept of “following” strangers. Now, I have people to whom I refer to as twiends (the people who I actually haven’t met, but feel like I have because of their great Twitter stream).
3. Search! This one is important enough that I wrote a whole blog post on it recently. Back when I used to just scan the tweets coming in from the folks I followed, I missed a lot. Whether you tweet for business or pleasure, pick a few things that pique your interest and follow what people are saying about them. Then, join in the conversation!
4. Don’t auto DM. I know that people LOVE to do this, but just as many HATE to receive them. People already have enough messages in their inbox — DM only if you have something important to say. It’s like email marketing — you shouldn’t send the same email to everyone in your database. Tailor-made content is king.
5. Community. Don’t fill your stream with marketing messages or with links to your blog. These things can be sprinkled in, but make sure you retweet valuable posts and use @replies to talk directly to people.
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