Twitter principles and beyond

Posted at August 30, 2009
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Some topics i discuss here are: what is Twitter, how to use Twitter and how to handle growing follower base in Twitter?

Twitter is a popular microblogging tool, which is an excellent platform for learning nature of social media. Simple to start, simple to use, simple to expand and simple to get hooked. There several ways of using Twitter. Some use it for blogging, some for staying in touch with friends, some for tracking trends and finding news. Some use it for building a community or network, driving traffic to websites, some for marketing and some just for fun telling what they do or where they are as it was the original function of Twitter. But it is a specialty of social media, that people find their own ways to use services. Twitter gave birth to thousands of applications by releasing and keeping up the API for programmers. This plus other simple principles made it a huge success in 2009.

Depending on your motives, the pressure point of using Twitter may vary, but I think there are some principles, that are common to all or at least most users. These principles work on any social media but I concentrate on Twitter here.

In communication there are four elements, that defines the word:

  • You as a creator of message: twitterer
  • Message that you send: tweet
  • Media you use to carry message: Twitter
  • Audience you target the message: tfollowers

Well this is a traditional definition. In social media communication should not be one way but bi-directional. For a successful communication and marketing you must be both a listener and sender and some suggest that is the order of preference. Btw. do you think you can listen and talk simultaneously? :)

Limits of listening and talking

In Twitter you can decide, what kind of account and personality (or impersonality) you create. Whether to make it anonymous, personal, corporate, 100% transparent or even fake (yes it is possible, but Twitter has a “Verified account” experiment going on, which may prevent harsh using of fake personalities in future) depends on your own expectations and prudence. 100% transparency is recommended for serious marketers and business holders. You are the creator of yourself.

Messages that you send are called tweets. Media you use is Twitter. Twitter is a bird that tweets your messages in a virtual forest of Twitterland or you can also think you are the bird communicating with other birds in Twitterland. Messages are truncated to 140 characters, which has forced to a vast creativity of users. Using abbreviations and hashtags you can put a lot of information in one Tweet. If you don’t realize the potential, you should read the book called Twitter Wit Twitter principles and beyond. It might inspire you in many ways. Strange cryptic feel of Tweets can be little confusing at the beginning, but also shows the creativity of human being, when you set any limits for them.

But media is actually not only Twitter, that transfers and pass messages to other Twitter users or audience in general. Like told earlier, there are thousands of applications, that use Twitter either to control Twitter accounts (your preferences, followers and tweets) or list Twitter users and index tweets for searching and sharing. One great aspect of Twitter is, that messages are spread over Internet faster, wider and louder than ever realized. For example if you have a WordPress blog working in conjunction with your Twitter account, your get backlinks to your blog posts freely from sources like http://realurl.org and http://topsy.com. Google respects Twitter accounts and tweets to a great value. Please see for example my name searches in Google: mmstud and Marko Manninen. With correct keyword research and work you can get a lot of net presence with creating Twitter account using the keyword as a username and start creating content.

Fourth element, the audience is the last link if we think one way communication. How many of us is interested to send messages to ourselves only? Although you can use Twitter as a notebook or some sort of thought storage, it is not very cool or is it? Even it may be cool for few of us, it is not very practical, because Twitter stores shows your tweets only for 10 days back! Because your tweets and activity are indexed by third parties as an effect your audience is not only inside Twitterland. It’s all over the internet. Sad truth is, that if you don’t have followers, you don’t have impact value to get your account and tweets indexed very well with search engines, you don’t have presence and influence to get your tweets re-tweeted and spread over Twitterland and finally you don’t have audience. Message not passed. Communication error.

Fifth, lets call it the etheric element is listening. As in all social life when you are a new comer, you should start from this. Become an apprentice, listen and learn. While there are no standards how to tweet correctly there is a Netiquette, that advices us with interaction. Every network marketer knows, how important it is to know your audience. If you jump to the stage and start promoting your truth incredible and the only one, changes are that you are going to lose the game. Even if you know your stuff. That’s the aspect I’ve admitted on network marketing in recent years; you cannot be successful in long stand, if you don’t develop your communication skills, if you don’t know yourself, other people and your product better. Listening is the magic substance that makes communication process from one way to two-way communication.

Thus becoming a power Twitter user means improvement and sustainability on all of these aspects. Next I will go little deeper to some practical ways of applying these elements on Twitter.

I Create your personal profile to attract people

a) Select appropriate name for your account keeping its informative, clearness, interest and SEO value in mind. Both username (screenname) and name are important.

b) Use profile picture and customize background. Choose good quality photos for your profile picture and use custom background picture. There are some good services to achieve this, if you are not graphics oriented like http://www.twitterbackgrounds.com or http://www.twitip.com

c) Write bio carefully and link your profile to external blog or homepage and back. Market your website and Twitter account in harmony. Make it personal and make it transparent, if you are serious for using Twitter as your social media platform of choice.

There are some tools to automate account creation, but you should be careful with this. Twitter don’t like mass account creation and if it finds suspicious activities, it will suspend account and all related. But one automation could help here: to change your bio every while and then and use it like a dynamic content area. You can do it if you use static personal information on left side of your background image as shown on above sites.

II Create interesting content for targeted people

a) Participate conversations with #hashtags, @replys and contact people with direct messages. Remember though, that @replys can be considered as mobile phone talking in public place. Don’t over use it.

b) Exchange emails when ever possible. One purpose of this is, that Twitter has some glitches on its service. If you are creating a network of friends, you need a back up. It can be another social media or traditional email list.

c) Be polite, mention and recommend other people. It is very important to notice that you don’t get followers to yourself primarily but create a network instead. When you help others, you get helped.

d) Spread links to other profiles, websites, video, audio and image sites. When you get famous and tens of thousands followers -> track links.

e) Think what you have to give, where you are special, develop yourself. Consider combining automatic and manual status updates. People like positive, inspirational and humorous quotes. You may debate, but I recommend make sure you know other side well enough and both sides realize ambiguous possibility on short sentences. Sometimes it’s really hard to take words back or explain your logic in such short textual format.

Versatility is the key. Not just links, not just replys, not just doings, not just quotes. Or at least versatility is important for creating a personal profile and brand. There is also an option that you just want to create news channel with strict content rules. Every Twitter account has a RSS feed, which can be used by other people and in case you are using Twitter to generate RSS, versatility might not be good. Again, everything depends on your purpose and use of Twitter.

III Intelligent use of media channels to get your message online

Main purpose here is to use services that promote either your Twitter account and profile or your tweets. There is plethora of online applications you should know and you could use. Let me just list a few of them to keep multimedia sharing in mind:

TwitterHolic http://twitterholic.com, WeFollow http://wefollow.com, MrTweet http://mrtweet.com, HootSuite http://hootsuite.com, FriendFeed http://friendfeed.com, TwitPic http://twitpic.com, twiddeo http://beta.twiddeo.com and Blib http://blib.fm

As told before, there are dozens of Twitter related search engines, that just indexes your tweets automatic and free, you don’t need to do nothing, but create content and be famous!

IV Build your network of followers

Where and how to get followers?

a) Outside of Twitterland

On first case you need websites, where you place links to your Twitter account and hope, that people have or create Twitter account and then remember to follow you. Website that has backlink to your Twitter page may be your own, directory, blogs and their comment sections, forums and so forth. Don’t forget, that you can use paid advertising to get more followers. You need to call them for action, that’s why there are nice “Follow Me” buttons all around websites today. Outside world means also offline aspect. You can be or become famous media person or other influent person that people respect and/or admire. Using TV, radio, book, poster or any advertising channel can work.

b) Inside of Twitterland

On second case we use Twitter or Twitter related sites to get more followers. Its all about how to attract more people, how to get yourself and your tweets seen as often and wide as possible. There are several methods that can be combined:

  1. Follow other people. When you follow other people, you are seen on their followers list so your changes grows, that you get recognized. Followed people usually get a notice, that someone has followed them and again changes are bigger, that you get followed. Some people has auto followers set thru some online service. It might sound bad quality follower, but is not always so. There is a special follow Friday (#FollowFriday), when people are even more likely to follow people mentioned on tweets. Simplest way to find interesting people is to use Twitter own search and browse the followed and followers list of your own friends.
  2. Tweet a lot and quality content. It is all about right attraction, correct way to interrupt people and trust people have to you and your content. You also need to remember right timing. People live in different time zones, so you need to find out, which is your target group of people, where they live and when they are online. I have noticed, that most of my followers are from time zone opposite of mine, so I have better response to my tweets when I make them at night and early at the morning. Best way to get your tweets available to larger audience is to use hastags and participate hot and important topics.

Some words on automation

To become a Twitter power user, you need to know dangers, limits and possibilities of each act. Manual work is the most secure way, but its slow and for non-influent “normal” person it definitely has limits on growing follower list. Still you can develop yourself, your online presence, your content and finally increase your influence level. It just takes time, someone has it, other has not.

Other way around is to use automatic or semi automatic services, either online web applications or desktop applications. There are both commercial and free software available. You can automate both searching interesting tweeters, following people and creating content aka. tweets.

One problem of getting your tweets spread over the net is, that if you don’t have followers, you don’t get your content ReTweeted and they will disappear to the endless flow of tweets. So you are left alone and it seems only solution is to flood your content several times an hour, all day long. But if you think it from other people perspective, you’ll find that your followers who has only 10-100 friends and who are using their public timeline to see their friends tweets, they get annoyed by one account filling their timeline and not giving space for other friends at all. Only really working method is to collect either small quality followers, who has bigger follower base than yours or a lot of friends and let them re-tweet your content. Which way to go depends on your situation, but I’d like to say, that both ways works and that is one of the most interesting aspect of social networking, it is giving equal changes to everyone, if we know how relations works on internet.

I think automation from two perspectives: Necessity for multi account keeper and activation of followers. You see a lot of automated direct messages nowadays. They still generate traffic and activate people, but people are not that stupid, that they don’t know when it is a auto generated message and when it is not. Mostly, if they see it auto message, they pass it. Some people get even mad, when they get automated messages to their “inbox”. While I rather think them nothing more than a call for action, I have found some interesting results doing different kind of “copys”. When you attach user name to the message, it will get more replys. If you put name in the center of message, it will give even more response. And finally if you put a question there response level increases again. One of my favorite auto message is similar to this:

Great to have you on my follower list {Follower name}! 
Its {Sunday 3pm} here, how about there? 
Just to know time difference... :)

{Follower name} and {Sunday 3pm} change per follower notice I get from Twitter. It gives a good starting point for a conversation and is useful information indeed because we communicate in a global arena with different time zones. Some said this is the most advanced automate message he has seen, I’d say its just the most advanced way to interrupt to start a communication for me so far. If you are interested to do something similar, I have shared scripts on my earlier post.

Interrupt in communication

How to handle friends tweets?

One concern and sometimes even critique presented is, that if you follow 100 000 people, you cant handle them and there is no sense on it at all. First we need to know, how you can filter tweets from Twitter web interface:

a) hashtag and search featured tweetlist -> random interesting tweets from Twitterland

b) public timeline, all followers 10000-1000000 -> random interesting tweets from your followers

c) @myname tweets targeted to me -> includes interference and noise from autorepliers and marketers

d) DM direct messages to me -> includes interference from auto direct messengers and marketers

Then you can use third party software to filter users tweets:

e) Seesmic, Tweetie, Twhirl, etc. has an automatic flowing update of your timeline. It is much better tracking your follower’s tweets than manual refresh of Twitter web page.

f) Seesmic USERLISTS -> collect all active and most valuable friends from your followers to a single list and see their updates only. Unlimited lists available.

Finally thanks to Twitter API you can do what you want with programming:

g) Create a script, which makes a list of all users that mentions you or direct messages to you, so that you have another kind of list of active users.

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