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Top 20 Twitip Twitter Tips of All Time!

Lara Kulpa — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 12:58:51 +0000

Yes, today I’m obsessed with the letter “T”.

I was looking through the site stats this morning and decided to see what the most popular posts were here at Twitip. It’s an interesting list, with the number one post having over 384,000 views! (Number 20 on the list has just over 23,000!)

Check them out, which one’s your favorite?

Use Apigee to Learn About the Twitter API

tdomf_2ae17 — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 13:30:26 +0000

On Wednesday at Chirp, Twitter’s developer conference, Apigee launched new developer tools for the Twitter API.

Developers and beginners can use the Apigee console to learn, experiment, test, or explore the Twitter API.

As you can see, each API method is listed down the left hand side. You can use these methods to explore different aspects and functions of the Twitter API. Choose the method you want to use, customize any parameter values, such as screen_name and ID, and hit the Test button. The Apigee console will then issue an API call and you’ll then see a cleanly-formatted response as well as the original request and response headers for the call. What does this mean for the developer? Well, it gives them unprecedented ease of use.

For API methods that require authentication, you can use HTTP basic authentication (a straight username and password). Better still, you can even sign in to Twitter and use that same authentication to sign API calls using OAuth (the system under “sign in with Twitter”). This is incredibly helpful for developers using the Twitter API because no other free tools support OAuth for Twitter methods.

But, possibly the best feature of all is the Snapshot. With Snapshot, any request and response you make with the API Console can be cached and shared with anyone else without your credentials. This is really helpful because it means that when you are trying to get help from someone else for a particular API response, you can just share your Snapshot of the call with them. Fabulous!

Start playing (for free) with the Apigee Console for Twitter!

Learn and Practice Languages Tweet By Tweet

tdomf_2ae17 — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 14:31:09 +0000

Many beginners as well as expert users of Twitter ignore its huge educational power. You often seem (or pretend) having no time to read long blog posts, but you can afford reading 140 characters even if you’re a very busy person!

Twitter allows you to learn new languages and practice them a little bit. Of course, it’s impossible to really teach a language at a tweet pace, but the speed and the conciseness of the medium can really make the difference in expanding your vocabulary with little effort and keeping your interest always alive.

Here a compilation of some “linguistic twitterers”:

French – Learn how to pronounce “Les jeux sont faits” and much more.
Spanish – Learn Spanish words and useful expressions.
Dutch – Helpful twitterfeed for Dutch learners.
Japanese – Learn a new word everyday.
Korean – You will learn that 음식이 형편없었어요 means “The food was terrible”.
Wordnik – Learn “difficult” English words everyday.
Urban – Learn urban English (are you “Santaclaustrophobic”?).
Na’vi – If you’re a real language geek, this can help you learn Na’vi, the invented language from the movie Avatar.

Happy language learning on Twitter!

In Life Timing Is Everything, On Twitter It’s More Important Than That

Guest Poster — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 13:09:39 +0000

By Nick Parkin of Pimlico Flats. Follow him @pimlico_flats.

It’s a common expression that in life, timing is everything. On Twitter, nobody tells you that your effectiveness is more dependent on timing that any other online activity.

Time your reading.

Beginners always think that twitter involves reading everything. If you want to give up your life do that by all means, but sensible people will limit their reading to appropriate times and ways.

Rather than becoming a slave to other people’s tweets, read at a time of your choice. Save yourself time by reading in bulk, rather than one tweet at a time. Switch off for periods and don’t worry about being out of the loop – if there is something important it will come round again. You can reconnect with everybody when you are ready, and the internet being what it is, they will be there waiting for you when you are ready.

Time your tweeting.

There is no point to tweeting when there is no one listening! Who are you hoping will be reading? If they are in a particular time zone, then you need to time your tweets when they are awake, and if you are in a different time zone to your audience it may be worth your while using Tweet Later.

Know when your audience is listening. This will vary from person to person, but my own audience is listening from 08:00 till 09:30 when they switch off to get on with some work. They reconnect at about 16:00 – 18:00 as they wind down the day’s work. My audience is UK, so those are GMT times for me. Take the time to observe what time of day you get retweets, replies, and when your followers tweet. Those times are the times that you should be tweeting yourself.

Vary your tweets to the time of day – don’t flirt with an audience in the office, don’t tweet a technical analysis to followers who have just had their third glass of wine and are relaxing on the sofa at home. Make your tweets appropriate to the mood of your followers, not to your own mood!

Don’t waste your followers’ time, that is the quickest way to lose a reader. Try to make every tweet worth reading. Don’t retweet items that everyone and their dog is retweeting, you won’t be first and they don’t want to read it AGAIN. Make time reading your tweets worthwhile, be unique and add value. When retweeting use the | character and add your own view after to make your tweet different and better than the original.

Take Time to Sharpen Up

Finally in the words of Covey’s “7 Habits of Successful People” – Sharpen the Saw. Take time to improve your tweeting, read, and learn.

Twitter Tips for Beginners [VIDEO]

Darren Rowse — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 13:47:51 +0000

Over the past few months I’ve presented at a number of conferences and to companies on how to use Twitter. On each occasion I’ve been asked for the slides and by others not at the presentations if there were videos of the presentations. Today I sat down to record some audio over one of the slide sets that I use.

While the presentation is titled ‘Twitter Tips for Business’ much of it would be relevant for anyone using Twitter whether they be doing so as a business or as an individual. The video goes for 40 minutes – so grab a cup of your favorite beverage and enjoy.

20 Must Read Beginner Twitter Tips for Small Business Owners

Guest Poster — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 13:23:45 +0000

By Mark Hayward – Follow him @mark_hayward.

Do you own a small business? Are you having a hard time understanding Twitter?

As a small business owner and social media user going on two years now, I can honestly say that initially I did not really see the point or power of Twitter at all.

However, after sticking it out passed the learning curve, picking up a couple of followers, and following really intelligent people, thanks to Twitter, I get to make connections and learn something new every day. In fact, at this point I feel like Twitter is a tool that all small business owners should use as part of their overall efforts to build a distributed social media footprint.

Nevertheless, if you are like many in the small business community who have tried Twitter without success, then you might be fond of saying, “I just don’t get it.”

For numerous small business owners (including myself at one point in time) who are new to Twitter, and social media in general, there appears to be a common misconception that as soon as you sign up customers are going to fall from the sky in droves and you will immediately be inundated with more business than you can handle.

Small Business Twitter Frustration
Amongst the business people that I discuss Twitter with there appear to be two types of discouraged small venture owners who give up on Twitter at rapid rate.

Frustrated business owner number one feels like Twitter is analogous to entering a large cocktail party or hotel lobby where she doesn’t know a single soul. Yet, conversations are happening all around her and rather than trying to ease into the discussion, she gives up without talking to anybody because the sheer numbers are overwhelming.

Disgruntled Twitter quitter number two is the complete opposite of number one. He will get on Twitter, see all of the conversations going on, and assume it is the customer “candy store.” This leads to the sending out of many spammy messages, which spew forth details about his great products and prices. He will typically stop using Twitter when to his surprise nobody follows him back and he doesn’t receive one @ reply.

Twitter Tips to Help Small Business Owners
Recently, a friend asked me to help him with that “Twitter thing” because he wants more customers for his niche jewelry business.

After our very long discussion and Twitter run through, I thought that perhaps there might be other business owners out there who are beginners on Twitter and could use some help. Here are the 20 tips that I passed on to my friend:

Twitter is first and foremost a place to connect, learn, and listen.
Define your goals if you have any (e.g. business promotion, socializing, etc).
If you’re confused about where to begin on Twitter, but are interested in learning, take a look at the previously done Twitip post that highlights key people for beginners to follow.
Twitter allows you to interact with individuals who you might not normally come into contact with. If you want to interact with a celebrity or a person with a huge following then send a simple @ message or comment on something they are doing. If you get a response you can then take it from there.
Don’t be offended if folks don’t follow you back. It’s not personal. (Even if it is, it doesn’t really matter.)
Use a photo of yourself or your business logo in you profile.
If you’re interested in connecting with someone you might want to try ReTweeting some of their messages before you introduce yourself.
It’s probably going to take a good 3 to 6 months to get a following.
Find out who the influencers are in your industry and see if they are on Twitter. If they are, follow them.
Always follow Jeff Pulver’s rule of giving 95% of the time and asking only 5% of the time.
Utilize a Twitter photo-sharing site like TwitPic or Yfrog to share cool photos from your typical business day, or while plying your craft, so that people get to know you. It helps to build social trust.
Use Twitter Search with keywords to find information and conversations that are relevant to your business. It’s also a good way to find out if anyone is talking about you or your company.
If you are not part of a particular conversation that concerns your area of business, but you would like to participate, approach with caution.
If you are sending DM’s to your followers with something related to your business, make sure to use your social capital wisely. Overwhelming folks with DM’s can result in a rapid loss of followers
Don’t Tweet anything that you would not want to see on the front page of a newspaper or wildly famous website.
Do interact and connect and don’t hesitate to @ message folks who have 10x or 100x the number of followers you have.
Employ sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, and Reddit to find, and share amongst your followers, interesting stories from your particular area of business.
Create connections don’t spam. You most likely would not just walk into a crowded venue where you don’t know anyone and say, “Hi my name is Bob and I replace window screens and have great prices.” This method does not work very well on Twitter. (Should be a given but you still see it every day!)
Twitter is only one area online where you can begin to build a distributed social media footprint for your business. Do NOT rely solely on Twitter as your social media business promotion tool.
It takes a long time to build up a following and develop trust, but it only takes one Tweet to alienate every one of your followers.

To be sure, on a daily basis we are all trying to figure how best to utilize Twitter effectively as a small business tool. Certainly, this is not a be all end all list, so your thoughts and input on how small business can better tap into Twitter are appreciated.

Lessons from the Evolution of Blogging Parts 6, 7 & 8

Guest Poster — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 13:13:10 +0000

I’ve decided to lump the last three parts of Lessons from the Evolution of Blogging series by Crystal N. Woods, from Conscious Evolution, Success and Self Esteem (@CrystalsQuest) here in one post. You can read the first five parts at the following:

Part 1 – Journaling
Part 2 – Link Lists
Part 3 – Conversations
Part 4 – Thought Leadership
Part 5 – Monetisation

Please share in the comments how you felt about this series! Would you like to see more series posts like this, or do you prefer the shorter, one-off posts?

Twitter Tips for Beginners: Lessons from the Evolution of Blogging Part 6 – Corporatisation

Corporate Blogs only started really emerging within the last few years. Apple, in particular, used blogging effectively in the launch of the iPhone – and it put them in a unique position to deal with teething problems when it first came out. After their notable success, I saw other corporations start following suit.

Corporations only tend to adopt a trend once they are convinced it’s gone mainstream, or unless it’s going to give them enough of a competitive advantage to offset the ‘risk’. When corporate blogging started emerging, the conventional media changed how they portrayed blogs – from thinking that blogs were a fringe element, to almost an unspoken assumption that this was a solid trend. More stories about blogging started hitting the papers and radio, especially of the “blogging is dead” kind (that usually only happens when a trend is alive and well, and just taking off, funnily enough).

You’d have seen the same thing recently with twitter.

Of course some journalists had been writing about blogging for years, or even running their own blogs, but when huge companies that employ thousands (which usually means changes in policy and processes are incredibly slow) start making changes to incorporate a new technology like this, then the arguments about whether it’s worth doing tend to stop, interest spikes, and those who haven’t already adopted it start to massively jump on board so they’re not left behind.

That kind of mass entry, though, is bound to result in a change in user demographics. With a change in the type of users and their focus, there was a change in the nature of blogging.

When blogging was about people and personalities, it attracted people and personalities. It was a form of remote friendship – hence the term ’social media’. Even when bloggers got big enough that their followers were more along the lines of fans than close friends, the relationship was still person to person.

Once blogging started including companies and corporations, it shifted away from that. After all, a corporation doesn’t tend to have much of a personality. Instead, corporate blogging tends to be about communication strategies and customer relationships. Where bloggers developed business plans, corporate blogging came in from the other end, and was designed to fit into their already existing business plans. It had to play nicely with other strategies and business methods already in place. Corporate Blogging is an add-on part of doing business, where personal blogging was a form of business in itself.

Some early efforts tried to use blogs as a method to broadcast their catalog, exactly the same way some companies first thought to use twitter. Most of those have learnt that online users want interactivity, not just advertising. Now, both blogs and twitter are being fit into the communication strategy as a two way means to provide support, as well as to broadcast notices.

Online computer and technology companies, of course, were the first to jump on board both trends. Dell computers, for example, has a whole page listing the twitter accounts for their various branches and departments. If you look at those, you’ll see that most of these twitter streams are about dialog (customer support and brand management) as much as about special offers – and that they also tend to point people off-site. Interestingly they link not just to Dell pages, but include other social media, like facebook.

To a corporate brand, the twitter audience is only part of the customer equation. Sure it’s important, and needs to be valued, but their objective is to connect with customers from anywhere and everywhere, AND cross link each segment to the others, to maximise the reach of their communication strategy.

The lesson to be learnt from this is a simple one. Raise your sights. Twitter is a means of communication, but should only be a part of your business strategy, not the entirety of it. If you want to build a business online, don’t limit your focus to just your site and twitter – there’s the whole web out there, and to maximise your reach and credibility you need to be tapped in to more of it than just one tiny part.

Twitter Tips for Beginners: Lessons from the Evolution of Blogging Part 7 - PR and Politics

As you know, the emergence of corporate blogging led to a shift in focus – and a similar thing is going on now with twitter.

When a person is building up their readership or follower numbers, they usually consider that an end in itself. The goal is to get the biggest score, right? For a corporate blogger or twitter account, though, it’s part of an overall strategy called “brand management”. It’s not just about letting more people know about your company, it’s about controlling what impressions people associate with you – reversing any damaging publicity, building positive public relations, and turning bystanders into customers and then into raving fans who’ll go out and get you more customers. Selling has already been covered under the post on monetisation, but the rest of it comes under the heading of “Branding”.

The professional bloggers had already picked up on this, and some were doing it even before the corporatisation trend hit. Their blogs had become businesses, which meant that they had to include branding in their strategies. Blog names became brands instead of individuals, even though we knew the individuals. You subscribed and followed Problogger, Copyblogger, or the Fake Steve Jobs – even though you knew that you were respectively reading the work of Darren Rowse, Brian Clark or Daniel Lyons.

Once you create a brand, though, you need to protect and grow it. I’m not just talking about legal actions here, either. Brand managers use advertising and other online tools to keep growing brand awareness, and just as importantly, damage control any negative publicity.

This is where the dialogue side of blogging came into it’s true strength. In the old days, if you bought, for example, a stale pack of potato chips, you MIGHT call the free customer number on the packet, and let the company know – especially if you thought they might refund or send you something in return. Then again, you might have just gono over to a competitor brand and told all your friends about your bad experience, so they shifted too. The company had no way of knowing, let alone doing anything about it.

These days, besides the customer service phone lines, companies can actually seek out & respond to those conversations with your friends. They can see that you’ve just written a post about how your latest juicer didn’t include the right attachments, and comment back – putting their customer relations out there for the world to see. Facebook made the process faster, and of course twitter pushed it right up to real-time.

It’s probably this aspect of blogging, and then social media, that made politics jump into using it. After all, I can’t think of a group more concerned about managing public opinion, perceptions and publicity than politicians. Can you?

Blogging – and twitter – are not just about responding to bad publicity – although they have empowered brands to do that as never before. They also have a fantastic ability to generate positive publicity as never before. It’s generally called “going viral”.

Here’s where the warning comes in. Going viral is a great thing – IF it’s done correctly (it can go horribly wrong) and if you’re prepared to take advantage of it (ask the numa numa guy). If it happens accidentally and you aren’t set up to cope, you can end up looking worse than if you’d just grown your brand the slower, surer way. Same if you try too hard, and it doesn’t come off. Like fire, it’s not something you should play around with.

The main lesson you should probably get from this post is that if you’re building yourself as an online brand, you need to start nurturing it – monitoring & controlling the impressions people have of you. Social media is a great way, maybe even an essential way, to do it.

If you want to use blogging or twitter for explosive growth, you can take the risk and turn to the viral side. I do, however, highly recommend you learn the skill from the master, first. There is really only one world class expert on the ‘how to’ of going viral, and that’s Seth Godin. Yes, he’s on twitter too.

Twitter Tips for Beginners: Lessons from the Evolution of Blogging Part 8 (Final) – The New Cycle

Blogs have been around for a while now, and there’s one aspect that keeps on recurring. Before blogs the same trend was happening with websites. Since it ties in so very strongly to a blogger’s success & reputation, even though it’s not noticeably happening within twitter, I believe that given time, it will.

I’m talking about the cycle of specialisation.

Yes, if you’ve been reading along, I have already started covering this in post 2 on link lists. Developing a successful topic niche, though, is also tied in to a bigger cycle, and that’s what I’m going to talk about in this final post.

The big name bloggers all had topics they became known for writing about. In the beginning, these topics emerged as the internet was evolving. Being a webmaster used to be a topic, as did Internet Marketing, and Traffic Generation.

As each of these fields developed, they grew to cover a range of subtopics. The field of Internet Marketing, for example, split to cover Copywriting, Article Marketing, Ezine Marketing, Pay Per Click Marketing and many others. Each of these sub-fields then became niches that the next generation of writers adopted and became the go-to experts for. The cycle has continued and now, as an example, the field of Pay Per Click Marketing is way too broad, and you look for someone like the Google PPC expert instead. In another few years, that will have further developed into a new level of niche experts – and so the cycle goes.

Twitter, for now, is mostly seen as an add-on strategy for bloggers or webmasters, and the names already well known are expanding into offering content via twitter. There will come a time, (provided it sticks around, of course) when it will have it’s own range of experts – microbloggers you go to for answers on emerging niche topics that blogs haven’t yet started to cover.

The strength of twitter as compared to blogs is its immediacy. You look to twitter to find what’s happening right now. We saw it come into its own in big events like the inauguration of Barack Obama, or even the Victorian bushfires in Australia. It’s fantastic for covering breaking news, and if you happen to be the one breaking it, you become the celebrity go-to person instantly. Of course, since everything happens so fast, that celebrity isn’t going to last very long once the next news item comes along, but that cutting edge of emerging niche areas is where the twitterati are going to emerge.

Researchers in specialist fields can get their results out instantly, and get the jump on others doing similar research by being the first one published. Similarly, as new online niches develop, and search engines fail to find sites or blogs that cover them, it will be services like twitter that jump in and deliver up the names that are already talking about them, as well as what they have to say.

That’s where the window of opportunity lies.

Twitter Tips for Beginners: Lessons from the Evolution of Blogging Part 5 – Monetisation

Guest Poster — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 13:01:49 +0000

The following is Part 5 of a series of posts by Crystal N. Woods, from
Conscious Evolution, Success and Self Esteem (Follow her @CrystalsQuest) You can also read Part 1 – Journaling, Part 2 – Link Lists, Part 3 – Conversations, and Part 4 – Thought Leadership.

Making money online is not only one of the most frequent topics in blogging, it’s also one of the hottest searches on any search engine, and it’s becoming ever more popular on twitter too.

I’ve left this topic until now because most of the people who start out with the sole objective of creating money making blogs, and more recently twitter accounts, do tend to be a bit obvious. If they succeed, they also tend to get short-lived success, mostly along the lines of niche blogs – they build one tiny area up to be profitable, then move on to another area. We’re seeing something similar on twitter where people are setting up multiple accounts.

Trend-surfing this way may get you a few big wins, or enough small ones to support yourself, but it isn’t the same as being one of the big-guns of blogging, earning 6 or 7 figures a year in stable and ever increasing income. There are very, very few of those (and they all have big followings, as I mentioned in the last post). While the average income for blogs in 2008 was $6,000, that was influenced heavily by the top 1% of bloggers who earnt $200k plus. Look at the top 10%, and the average income is down to only $19k.

You may be surprised to know that most of the blogging big names didn’t start out earning their income that way. In fact, very few of them earnt their livelihood from blogs to start with. Some of them, like Cris Brogan and Robert Scoble, still have offline jobs. Darren Rowse of Problogger paid his bills with multiple part time jobs while he built his blog up to the level where it would support himself, and kept going from there to the income levels of today. Yaro Starak of Entrepreneurs-Journey supported himself with an editing business and a gamers site before he grew big enough to earn a full time income from blogging. David Risley of davidrisley.com (Confessions of a 6 Figure Blogger) has made his income online for years, but when he started most of that income came from consulting work, not blogging.

Every single one of these Blogging-Income Masters say the same thing: you don’t get that level of income unless you treat it seriously. Blogging is a business. If you want to turn it into your income, you need to have a Business Plan.

Twitter is the same.

There are no shortage of ways to turn blogging into an income, although not quite so many on twitter yet. Already, though, the “Make Money with Twitter” offers are starting to flood in. A lot of them are going to make money for the people selling them, and not many others. The tried and true methods that have worked for the top names in blogging, though, are summarised below:

Have a plan. It’s as true on twitter as it is elsewhere. Failing to plan = planning to fail.

Build a list. Yes, twitter is a list of sorts, but if your follower has 348 other people tweeting at the same time, your update will be all too fleeting. Convert them to your mailing list, or at the very least your blog’s rss feed! Remember: the money’s in the list.

Over-deliver on value. Your followers are not going to throw money at you just because you put your hand out for it – especially not as any kind of sustainable income. Prove to them that you deliver the goods, and they’ll think of you down the track when they need what you have to offer.

Build a reputation. The trust and credibility people give you is the equivalent of brakes to your online income. If you don’t have much, you won’t get much. I saw a tweet not long ago by a well known social media expert on how someone with a tiny fraction of his follower count was trying to sell him a system to build more followers. Needless to say, there was zero credibility there.

Find out what your followers want. The way to make money is to offer solutions. You can’t do that until you know what problems people are facing, and decide which of them you have the skills and know-how to help them overcome.

Be Consistent and Persistent. This feeds back into all of the above. If you’ve created a plan, make sure you follow it – it’s sad but true that the majority of people give up before they succeed. Keep taking action past the point where others drop out, and you win the race by default.

Twitter Tips for Beginners: Lessons from the Evolution of Blogging Part 4 – Thought Leadership

Guest Poster — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 13:00:44 +0000

The following is Part 4 of a series of posts by Crystal N. Woods, from
Conscious Evolution, Success and Self Esteem (Follow her @CrystalsQuest) You can also read Part 1 – Journaling and Part 2 – Link Lists or Part 3 – Conversations.

As blogging went mainstream, and more newcomers started flooding the market, the earliest bloggers were given a bit of momentum forward into the online equivalent of celebrity status – they were the trend-setters.

Not all of them took advantage of this push, though, while some of the newcomers rapidly adapted to blogging and took it by storm, getting their own place high up in the heirarchy with amazing speed.

The difference between these thought leaders and the majority of bloggers is the same difference we see affecting who gets promotions at work, makes it as a ’star’ in Hollywood, or even gets nominated to run the local Rotary Club. It’s simply this: in order to lead others, you have to be willing to get out the front and lead others. Much easier said than done, I know. After all, the ones that sit in front at school are picked on for questions, and it may be a movie cliché but the sketch about asking for volunteers to step forward, and one person gets picked because everyone else steps back, is more true than we’d like to think. Leadership is something we’re not only encouraged, but trained to avoid.

If you want to go professional, though – on twitter, on your blog, or in life – you have to be willing to step out in front and take the risks and responsibilities that go with it.

Let me be clear here, though. You don’t actually have to do this. It’s not only possible, but fairly easy, to build up a modest following by taking the lessons of the last 3 posts on board; sharing of yourself, offering solid value and building relationships. If you’re happy there, by all means stay there.For those willing to move on further, though, this is where you distinguish yourself from the pack.

The biggest lesson to advance yourself to this next level is: You have to be fearless – or at least appear to be (it’ll come if you fake it long enough).

You still need to edit what you say, but this is where you stop editing out those things you’re only holding back because of what others might think. Be up front about what you believe every now and then, and if you get some controversy going, great! People that don’t think along the same lines will either argue with you (getting you more publicity as well as giving you the chance to put your reasons forward) or if they’re really opposed to your thoughts, leave.

You may be surprised that this is where I tell you that’s a good thing.

The people who leave you because of something controversial you’ve said can actually get you more followers, believe it or not. They talk about your stand, so they can tell people how they disagree, and some people come looking for you so they can see your side of the story (or so they can pick a fight with you too). Some of them may stay.

To become a thought leader, you want to lead people who are happy to have you lead them. I’ve already mentioned that most people are happier being followers than leaders (to paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, most people “prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of Liberty.”) but the internet is big enough that you should find plenty of people who like your point of view, or at the very least admire you for having the strength of your convictions, and decide to keep watching. That’s the nuts and bolts of how you start to get a following.

Next issue, we’ll cover one of the biggest topics in blogging, and rapidly in twitter too – turning that following into an income. Monetisation.

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.

Twitter Tips for Beginners: Lessons from the Evolution of Blogging Part 4 – Thought Leadership

Twitter Tips for Beginners: Lessons from the Evolution of Blogging Part 3 – Conversations

Guest Poster — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 13:01:09 +0000

The following is Part 3 of a series of posts by Crystal N. Woods, from
Conscious Evolution, Success and Self Esteem (Follow Crystal @CrystalsQuest) You can read Part 1 of Lessons From The Evolution of Blogging – Journaling and Part 2 – Link Lists here.

The Blogging community grew bigger as more blogs were started, and existing blogs shared the love by linking to them. Of course if you know SEO, you’d know that this meant the search engines started paying attention to these, and more people started discovering blogs. The community stopped being small, but started to distinguish between the well known and established bloggers, and the newcomers who were still learning the ropes.

This is where conversations come in. Bloggers would read a new post by someone, with their editorial comments on it, and write an answering post on their own blogs. Naturally, this added fuel to the SEO fire, as cross linking gave blog sites some serious weight. As the art took off and gained momentum, and more people wanted to start blogging themselves, software started making it easier to create and update your blogs, and eventually the ability to comment was born.

Enter the era of interactivity. (Don’t try saying that after a few drinks, ok?) Bloggers could now do more than just put their opinions out there – they could get feedback and, more importantly, develop a following. For the bloggers that had come from the beginning, this was a major step forward – they could write responses, as well as just diarize their thoughts. They could build their own reputation and grow their audience.

Twitter uses the @reply for exactly the same thing. This is the essential tool for making contact with people you’re following, who are asking questions you know the answers to, or to catch the attention of people you’d like to connect with.

@replies turn twitter from a one way monologue into a dialogue. They’re an important part of any twitter user’s toolbox.

The lesson you need to take from the successful thought-leaders of the blogging world in this stage, though, is the importance of holding conversations that include, and don’t exclude, your other followers. Have you ever stood waiting at a party where someone you wanted to talk to was so involved in a one-on-one discussion that the rest of the room might as well not have existed? That’s what you want to avoid. Don’t cold-shoulder the room.

Remember that not everyone will know what you’re replying to when you send a response to someone else – try to phrase your reply so it’s not one-sided and people have no idea what you’re talking about. Put it in context, like the second example tweet below.

@questionasker Pirates of Carribbean. Years ago.

@questionasker – last movie I went to see was yrs ago: Pirates of Carribbean”

Anyone reading the second one knows what you’re answering, and may even join the conversation.

Finally, It’s important to remember that, just like any party, conversation should be mixed with mingling, too. Keep giving out comments and links that others can appreciate and/or react to (which can start more conversations). You build the community, AND your followers, that way.