Guidelines I Follow When Using Twitter

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Today, I that I would share with some tips and resources for new Twitter users and those Twitter users looking for advice on how to better use Twitter. This article will be broken down into two parts because there is simply too much information to list in one article. Part two will be posted next week. This short series is mostly about what works for me and my experiences with Twitter. Edited article Feb. 11, 2011

• Part one is all about how I use Twitter and the guidelines I follow.
• Part two is all about the tools and resources I use daily to make Twitter easier to use.

What is Twitter?

For those that do not know, Twitter is a social networking and mircroblogging service that allows users to send and read 140 character long messages. Twitter has a huge following with over a 175 million users world wide.

Why Is This Important?

Depending on how you use Twitter, you can build a huge following and those followers are influenced by what you tweet. A business could invest time into building a large list of followers (kind of like sales leads). They could use Twitter to market their latest products, services, customer relations, and press releases. Once the messages are tweeted out the followers will follow the links and if the like what they see, they share those links with their followers. A good market campaign could go viral in few minutes after a message is tweeted. Once this happens in a short while everyone knows, and your sales go up, you are getting new readers on your site, and you’re getting new followers at the same time.

How I Started Using Twitter

When I first started using Twitter in 2008 I had no clue what I really wanted to do with the account and I was still new to social media. I had been using Facebook and MySpace for a while but I really didn’t use it as I do now. So I started following anyone and everyone that I could, only getting rid of spammers. But in 2009, I started following Twitter users in the blogging, SEO and Design niches and I realized what I wanted to do and that I wasn’t using Twitter to its full potential. I stopped working on my old blog projects and stopped following users that weren’t in my favorite niches. I Then started following those in new media niches and I created a set of guidelines to follow that would help me with getting new followers, meet new users, and get traffic back to my sites.

There Are No Rules For Twitter, Just Guidelines For Twitter

I do not believe in rules for Twitter or any other social network. Using social media is all about being social and having fun. Creating rules takes the fun out of social media and makes it a job. However, I do believe in having some guidelines to follow when using Twitter. The guidelines should be designed to benefit you, your brand, and those that follow you. When creating these guidelines, think about your reasons why you want to use Twitter and the goals you want to accomplish when using Twitter. And the best part is you can always change these guidelines when your goals change for the better or worse.

Guidelines For Twitter

As mentioned before, guidelines should be designed for how you use Twitter. The guidelines listed here are the ones I use to gain more followers, find new users, resources, site exposure and building traffic through retweets. Think of it as advice and I am sharing with you and it works for me. What works for me, may not work for you.

If you’re a new user and not sure what you plan to do with Twitter or you are just a causal user, these guidelines can help you have a better user experience.

1. You control who you follow, what you Tweet and what lists you create. What I mean by this is if you do not like Twitter for some reason, you are in control of how you use Twitter. If you do not like something, then change the way you use it, remove those that annoy you, Tweet about topics that interest you and those that follow you, create lists to break up your stream to make it easier for you to read your Twitter stream. Create conversations with your followers
2. Don’t get to personal. Most followers do not want to know what you are doing every minute of the day. But, it is alright to engage with your followers and get to know them and they should be able to get to know you.
3. You do not have to follow everyone that follows you. Just because someone follows you doesn’t mean you have to follow them back. Only follow those that interest you.
4. Try and Tweet daily. Social media experts say that in order to keep your followers interested, you should be tweeting useful content ten to twenty times a day. ( I am not a social media expert, I just know this works for me)
5. Do not flood everyone’s stream with multiple tweets. Try not to tweet more than one or more tweet in a short period of time. Dumping five or more tweets in short period of time, is annoying and no one likes this. If you do this to many times, you will loose followers. Try and spread them out over the day if not try and spread them out over several hours.
6. Do not automate your user accounts. The point of Twitter and other social media networks is to be sociable and to engage with others! If you automate everything you do on Twitter how can you engage with others? It is alright to automate some parts of your Twitter account. I will go into what I automate and what I do not.
7. Reply to @mentions. I try and reply to all those that mention, retweet my tweets, and start a conversation. If someone starts up a conversation, I generally follow them back.
8. Retweet links that you like, and share useful content with others. One way to get noticed and followed is by sharing useful content related to your niche. Whenever you find a useful article that someone tweeted, retweet it, you do this enough, and some people may follow you back or start following because you are a retweeter.
9. Never tweet a message that someone else tweeted as your own. Always add a RT @username or via @username when tweeting a message someone sent a message out before. This only applies to Tweets / content discovered on Twitter from another user.
10. Get your own image or logo for your Twitter image. Using the default images discourages Twitter users from following you. A lot of times, spammers will create accounts and use them until Twitter removes the account. They get removed so quickly that the spammers do not even bother adding images to their accounts.
11. Fill out your Bio. You have 140 Characters to do it. Do not use keywords or hashtags, just do a short little bio about yourself and what you tweet about.
12. Add your website, if you have one. Does not use a URL shorten but the full length URL. This way, new users and potential followers will be more likely to click on your link. A lot of times, spammers and bad Twitter users will use short links to hide the real address so they can send you to bad neighborhoods and spam sites.
13. Be careful, Twitter accounts that have beautiful women as their avatar might be spammers or bots. Read their stream before following them back. If they are spammers, report them.
14. Use Hash Tags (#wordpress) whenever you can. Some Twitter users follow certain hash tags and if they are following a hash tag you added to your Tweet then they might see your Tweets.

These are just a few of the guidelines I follow everyday when using Twitter. Following these guidelines is only a suggestion and can help meet goals for Twitter.

What guidelines do you follow?

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