I am talking about Twitter at the First Tuesday Blog Club tomorrow night. This may be an odd format for a blog post, but here are some of the ideas I may or may not talk about, depending on how the session goes, with links to the places some of the ideas are derived from:
Intro
- Why do you use Twitter?
- Do you want to use Twitter for business or pleasure?
- What to you want to achieve with Twitter?
- Does it matter?
I won’t be telling you how to get 300,000 followers; but I can tell you how I have got to 1,400!
Why I use Twitter
- Working on joint project – questions and answers.
- Offering tech help – stuck volume control on iPad.
- Retweeting observations: “If only they enforced bank regulations like they do park rules, we wouldn’t be in this mess.”
- Reading thoughts: “Closed networks are ignorance amplifiers”.
- News: The world’s lightest material has been created – a nanotechnology metal grid 100 times lighter than polystyrene foam.
- Sharing domestic activities: Making Christmas pudding.
https://delarue.net/blog/2012/04/a-series-on-social-media/
How to get “Klout”
- Set goals?
- Develop your own voice
- Get noticed
- Find interesting hashtags and use them – eg #km, #kmlf, #kmedu
- Find people using paper.li and tweet on their subjects
- Get re-tweeted by influencers
- Klout.com is interesting, and gives some guidance on your effectiveness.
- It can tell you a bit about your style
- It isn’t everything, and don’t compare yourself too much with others, as it can be gamed.
- It can be misleading: eg, am I influential on Melbourne, Sydney and the Philadelphia Eagles?
How to misbehave on Twitter
- Multiple @s too often
- Nothing but links
- Duplicating same link > 25%
- Posting same tweet too often
- > 50% “app spam” – 4 sq, blip.fm, etc
- No activity for over one month
- Fewer than 10 tweets
- Never interact with followers
- Over 90% RSS feed
- Follow back < 10%
- All talk, no interaction, over 24 per day
- Unoriginal – > 70% RTs
- Self-obsessed – > 50% of tweets about themselves
- Unpopular – < 30% follow back
Expanding your scope
- Set goals.
- Choose who to follow – look at lists. Where is your audience?
- Tweet throughout the day. Use schedules, but be there to follow up.
- Use a simple handle that is easy to remember.
- Use your profile – include useful info, a welcoming picture and link to landing page.
- Connect with other social networks
- Do not use protected tweets or validators – make it easy!
- Remember to think about context, particularly if you are tweeting via another social network.
- Be helpful to others – it’s not all about you.
- Be nice – don’t name and shame unfollowers.
http://inboundmarketinggeek.com/twitter-mistakes/
And who knows? Some of that may even make some sense. Thanks to those on Twitter who tweeted some of the links I have used here.
This is without a doubt the best article of do’s and don’ts on twitter i”ve ever read, WOW
Ian –
Thanks for the comment.
I am of the opinion that there is a lot more to Twitter than just telling people where I am or what I had for lunch. Have a read of the Business West article linked here for more of my thoughts on this.
Re the LinkedIn connection – I did keep these separate for some time, particularly when the latest LinkedIn status stayed at the top of the profile. However, status updates now seem to age out fairly rapidly, so I linked my accounts.
I have found that attempting to put some sort of an dividing line down my life between “work” and “personal” is rather awkward and artificial. Even more so since I left a large corporation and went solo. (Even then, I was blogging for the company for a while, too.) I am personally interested in my work, and my work is about things I enjoy doing.
Yes, I do have different audiences on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, but what I do and who I am doesn’t change in these arenas.
So I present myself in the same way in all of my social media. And I want to work with people who will take me for who I am, not for a limited, constrained persona. For this reason, I will continue to send my tweets to LinkedIn.
– Keith.
ReTweating Twitter to LinkedIn can have a negative impact.
Continually telling the world where you are, what you had for lunch etc demeans and indeed attacks your professional profile on LinkedIn