Various aspects of the tweeting community
Twitter is very similar to a face to face conversation. It’s a mixture of small talk, relationship building, helping others, getting help and sharing yourself with others. Here are some tips for improving your presence on Twitter.
1. Be patient, it takes time to build your network and remember what you say reflects on how people see you.
2. Remember Twitter is about two way conversation — you need to answer as much as you ask but most importantly share information of value.
3. Find interesting and worthy tweets for retweeting.
4. Admire and recommend few people from your network, it shows your interest, mindsets and you will get same response back.
5. Follow people who follow you unless you think they are spammers – those who are just selling products or services.
6. Find people to follow who have similar interests as you, those who share great information and links or who willingly engage in conversations.
7. Learn the Twitter language and how to use it well. Here are some basics.
- Handle – is my username with an @ symbol before it. @SandraMccarty is my Twitter handle.
- RT — any tweet starting with “RT” indicates you are re-broadcasting someone else’s tweet.
- Hashtags – any word on twitter that starts with the “#” sign. Hashtags make it easier to search and follow the twitter conversations on specific topics.
- Direct message also called DM – these messages are private between only the sender and recipient. Tweets become DMs when they begin with “d username” to specify who the message is for. DM can only be sent to someone who is following you.
For more on Twitter language see Twitter Glossary.
8. Avoid using up all 140 characters as it makes retweeting harder and some experts recommend using less than 124 characters.
9. Remember online is forever. If you do not want it online do not tweet it.
10. It’s extremely easy for others to misinterpret your written text so give some thought to what you write.
Here are some ways Twitter can be used:
- Publishing “content” such as interesting links and updates with text, picture and video.
Stand out in the noise
- Build a social community with people who have similar interests by interacting with my followers.
- Get people interested in blogs by tweeting links to new posts.
- Get help and feedback by asking questions and posting polls.
- Monitor news and trends.
- Reading up on what others are reading and what they find interesting.
- Keep track of the competition
- Get inspiration
- Live blogging from events, conferences and workshops.
- Have fun
- Fundraising
- Staying in touch with friends
Do share with us what you use Twitter for and how we can improve our presence on this social media tool.
Lot’s of useful information here, Sandra~ thanks!
Sometimes it is very useful and interesting to add a video to post, that makes your imagination process much more clear.