I dove right in to twitter, and just started going. I regularly would google twitter tips, but for the most part, I went with trial&error.
When one of my client’s asked for a few tips, I thought I’d also put them up here. There’s tons of posts about how to properly use twitter, so I’m really just reiterating the basic stuff and adding to the cloud.
1. Be sure to tweet 90/10 ratio.. that’s for every tweet you make about your business, you should be tweeting 9 tweets about other things like interests, passions, news, companies, other people etc that fall in line with your core values and brand messaging but don’t promote your brand explicitely.
2. www.socialoomph.com allows you to set up an autofollow system that is handy because you can vet your new followers if you so choose. I have this set up for clients so that when someone follows them, they are placed in a queue for me to vet, if they aren’t spammers but are genuine fans of the company, I approve them. If not, they simply don’t get followed.
3. Google people who return follow (auto follow) and add some who’s values are in line with yours, that’s Guy Kawasaki’s suggestion: that innovators have tons of followers but it’s the masses that promote your business, so for every large following you accumulate you’re helping move your business into the conversation. So add as many people who autofollow as you can, and you’ll end up with a higher number of followers by default. Just try and keep the amount of people you follow BELOW the amount of people who follow you -Twitiquette (twitter etiquette) dictates you look like a spammer if you follow a significantly higher amount of people than the number that follow you.
4. If you google “journalists on twitter” you’ll get many databases of journalists who tweet – then it’s all about finding the ones that would be appropriate to your business and following them. If you see them tweet something relevant to you, respond, and build up a relationship, so you can eventually pitch them an idea. I also do this with bloggers and have successfully gotten blog coverage over twitter
5. www.friendorfollow.com is a great little site that lets you see who’s following you that you aren’t following back, and vice versa. I use it to cull the list of followers if I’m ever approaching the point of following more people than are following me back.
Twitter has become the ‘to-do’ for businesses, and I can see why. People go where word-of-mouth takes them, and Twitter is the giant megaphone for giving your recommendation to an infinite number of people. As long as you’re adding value, you’re helping Twitter be useful.