Twitter Tips!

Over the last year I have developed a huge interest in the Social Media platforms and how they are shaping and influencing both the online world and daily life. Recently I read an article which informed me how many members the three biggest Social Media platforms have. The biggest by a long shot is Facebook, with over 500,000,000 members! Second is Twitter, with over 200,000,000 members, and third is LinkedIN with over 100,000,000 members (some of which pay for premium membership). Today I thought I’d focus on Twitter and how to use it. I don’t claim to be a “Twitter expert” in any way, shape or form, I just think these tips may help a few people out there.

Pros

• Over 200 million members
• You can connect freely and easily with almost anyone
• Information (tweets) are kept short and sweet
• Many users visit the site several times per day
• Great way to connect and get to know people

Cons

• Limited with 140 characters per tweet
• 99% of people have a marketing angle
• Limited User Interface compared to other social networking sites

Here are my Twelve Top Twitter tips:

1. Have a Picture - You will see very few people with a large amount of followers who don’t have a picture. A picture on your profile adds a personal element to it.

2. Have an interesting Bio - You only have 160 characters in which you can describe yourself, if your bio is interesting and says enough about you people will normally follow you if they come across your profile.

3. Stop trying to sell all the time! – 80% of your time on Twitter should be spent NOT SELLING A THING, because you lose people’s interests if you are always trying to sell them something. “Social Media” is effectively a medium through which people socialise, not a Marketplace. If you are going to sell something, do it subtly and infrequently.

4. Vary your tweets - Following on from the point above, keep your tweets varied – sometimes about business, and sometimes about pleasure. If you come across an interesting article or piece of news that you think may be of value or of interest to some of your followers, be sure to tweet about it. Mixing business with pleasure in your tweets allows your followers to get to know you better.

5. Interact with your Followers - The best and most active users on Twitter regularly mention other people and have two-way tweets. This is a good way to engage your followers and show them you actually give a damn and aren’t just trying to sell them something.

6. Follow the leading people in your Market - In terms of business, you can easily search for the “Market leaders” in your market, and follow not only them but their followers as well! This is a great way to keep your finger on the pulse of your market and attract new, targeted followers.

7. To gain followers, you must first follow! – Unless you are a celebrity or at least well known online, you won’t get thousands of followers automatically. You must follow as many people as possible to have more people following you. The people with high “organic” followings may only be following 400 people, yet 40,000 people are following them! However, for the “Average Joe”, you must follow to be followed, and don’t be offended if people don’t follow back!

8. Retweet other people’s stuff – If someone tweet’s something of interest to you, retweet it! It’s a good way to interact and share and spread valuable or intersting information, and if they link to something in their tweet make sure you check what is at the other end before retweeting!

9. Use it Regularly – As I mentioned earlier in this article, many people Tweet several times a day, so try to do this yourself, as the more regular you use it, the more followers you are likely to get, providing you follow the other steps. Tweeting early morning/late night will also mean that your followers in other countries and Time Zones will see your tweets.

10. Use Software for certain tasks – You can spoil your efforts by automating too much of your social media experience, however a great idea is to get a tool that automatically messages your new followers. I use MarketMeTweet, they have recently released version 3.0, and I truly believe the software is awesome, and use it myself. You can do more or less everything on Twitter from this application, apart from view profile’s and change your profile account settings.

11. Keep Tweets Punchy and Attention grabbing – Twitter is all about brevity and efficiency, so be sure to be brief and efficient in your tweets, a few words linking to an article or news story is usually enough so that people grasp the concept, and can click the link if they want to read more. The fewer words you need to get to the point, the better.

12. Shorten url’s to save characters – There are dozen’s of free sites that you can use to shorten your url’s to save on character space. t.co is a url shortening service for Twitter posts only, but there are many general url shortening services such as bit.ly and goo.gl andtinyurl.com .

Hope this has helped. Catch me on Twitter at twitter.com/robert_pf . Feel free to tweet me or comment underneath with your thoughts on this post. Thanks