Archive for the ‘Twitter’ Category
A friend of mine recently asked me for a link to a Twitter Etiquette source. Here’s the gist of the email I sent him.
http://business.twitter.com/twitter101/best_practices
I use twitter to talk about my niches AND make comments through the day if I happen to see something I like. I occasionally tweet something personal, but that is about 20% of the time.
I find blogs to follow and then tweet about those blog posts. I occasionally put my own blog post into the twitter stream.
I do not auto follow people who follow me. I just end up with spammers. I will go through my followers and follow back people who are interesting and engaging and REAL.
I do not send an auto DM (Direct Message) to people when they follow me. That is usually a useless thing to do.
I do have a program that I use to follow people. It searches for people with common interests or searches for people who fit my demographic for a particular market. I use Tweet Adder for that. Do not overuse something like this.
You should get your name if you can. My Twitter URL is www.twitter.com/DaveAustin
You can get your business name too. Getting both is a good idea.
I don’t tweet about stuff that is useless. “Going to bed now.” “Have a coffee” etc. That does not ad value to the twitter world.
Use TweetDeck to group people so you can focus a small group of people to talk to. I have an small group of people and I care about what they say and I engage them. I have to have this group because otherwise I have to watch a stream of 7500 people who follow me. It’s full of crap. Setting up a group is a very effective way to focus who you listen to. I usually am adding several people a week to this group, because I see that they have something valuable (to me) to say.
My Summary:
Try to add value.
Try to Engage people.
Talk to people who say things that are interesting.
Talk to people in your market.
DON’T get sucked in. Just twitter a couple of times a day in a block of time and then leave twitter so you can get other stuff done.
Hope this helps.
Man. I was a fan of some automation when it came to twitter.
I used Tweetlater and would send you a DM then I realized that I never read them when I received them so I stopped.
Then.. I would autofollow you back if you followed me. Seems reasonable right? WRONG. I don’t need to follow Shoe Stores and Porn sites.
I will follow people I like, I will follow many people in a day if I think you are interesting and have something to say. BUT even then I have to set up a smaller group in TweetLater to be able to handle actually following your conversations.
So Enough is Enough. No more auto follow and now I have to go back and cull my crowd, clean up my twitter stream.
So you want to Twitter more than:
“Good Morning”
“Good Night Twitterers”
“Having Coffee”
You should. That is if you want to communicate with your Tribe of people and have them LISTEN to you. If you are just twittering with a couple of friends or family then knock yourself out talk about your coffeeshop visits.
If you want to have people follow you for what you have to offer, then start sending them what they need or want to hear about. What I found is that finding stuff to talk about took A LOT of Effort and Time.
It Doesn’t need to.
Here’s What I do.
I use Google Reader and Hootsuite to manage a lot of my tweeting. There are other platforms, and I’ll get to those in another post, but for now, let’s just talk about these two.
In Google Reader I do 2 things. I follow specific blogs and I have blog searches piped into the reader.
Step 1: Follow a bunch of Blogs and put them into your reader
Step 2: Do a Google Blog search and then put the RSS feed into your reader.
Step 3: Categorize all of these “feeds” into one folder within Google Reader so you can review them all in one place.
Step 4: Review the posts that you want to tweet about and use the “Hootlet” to directly tweet from the blog post. So you would visit the blog post or web page that you are interested in and if it looks like it will be interesting to your readers then use the hootlet to schedule the tweet to your twitter account.
That’s It.
Here’s the best part. By having the Blog search set up for keywords, I can find new authors and blogs and I can then add their specific blogs to my reader for future review.
After getting this all set up, it takes me about 10 minutes a day to get a bunch of quality tweets sent into my twitter account and scheduled for the day.
Got any other ideas, then comment below.