Twitip

Relationships are at the heart of good use of Flickr. Today Vera Raposo (follow her at @veraraposo) from Small Business Branding shares some tips on being more relational with Twitter.

Recently at my site I put out a question to my readers, “Are You A Twitter Snob?” It was something I’ve been thinking about for some time. It really started to annoy me when people would join Twitter, have all these followers and then never follow people back. It also was bothering me that people are just not taking the time to reply back to others. The post really turned more into a rant than anything but I think it got a good point across. After my rant was done I figured, now I really need to take the time to come up with some positive ways we can connect with others on Twitter.

Image by notsogood

Here are five of the more common ways we can build relationships with others via the use of Twitter.

1. Connect with Friends & Family

Whether you’re a stay at home mom, small business owner, or just looking for some friendly conversation, Twitter is a great place to forge new friendships. You can easily begin following those with similar interests and before you know it, you’ve made friends from all over the world.

Ever wonder what happened to your best buds in high school or college? Twitter has been used to connect with old friends from the past as well. Unlike MySpace or Facebook type sites, Twitter makes it easy to talk with others in real time instead of leaving a message and waiting for your friends to sign on and reply.

Are you a military family who moves a lot? Do you attend college in a different state than your family lives? Do you travel for work? If you spend time away from your family and would like a way to keep in touch that is more personal than email, try Twitter.

2. Find Work

Many times Twitter users post employment or freelance opportunities. They may need a freelance writer to put together a few articles for them or a graphics designer to create images for their website. Other Twitter users also post about jobs they know of that might interest their followers.

3. Gain New Customers and Clients

As a business owner, you should already know that word of mouth advertising is one of the best and least expensive ways to gain new business. With Twitter it’s not uncommon to see business owners plugging their own products to their followers. Perhaps even better, is when others who have used the product begin talking about it to their followers?

By following those in your target market on Twitter, you put yourself in a position to find out exactly what it is they need. What better way to do market research and maybe even make a few friends in the process. Just no spamming pretty please..

4. Find Products or Services You’re In Need of

As a consumer, word of mouth plays a big factor in whether or not you decide to buy a product. By communicating with other Twitter users, you learn what businesses are worth buying from and which to steer clear of. Twitter users will gladly share their opinions of products or services that they’ve used in the past.

Looking for a particular product or service and have trouble finding it? Don’t fret; your Twitter pals can more than likely lend a hand. Just sign in and ask your followers if they know where you can find it.

5. Form Partnerships

Because Twitter includes people from all over the world, the chances of meeting someone you may not have ever come in connect with otherwise, are high. You might have an affiliate program that fits the needs of a website owner half way across the globe.

There have also been many business partnerships blossom on Twitter. Do you have a passion for something, but don’t have all the skills necessary to make it a money making reality alone? Following those with the same interests can lead to turning your dream into actuality by forming a joint venture.

Twitter is a powerhouse on the Internet when it comes to forming relationships with others. Whether you’re just looking for some conversation, want to keep abreast of the latest news around the world, or are looking for thoughts and opinions a particular item, the site has a way of giving you what you seek through those who use it. Relationships are what make the world go around and when you aren’t limited to a small area, but instead have the entire world to connect with, the possibility of forming lasting relationships is a promising one.

This post follows up a post yesterday that explored Why Asking Questions on Twitter is a Powerful Technique.

OK – so asking questions is important – but are any questions OK on Twitter? What kind of questions work best?

Photo by Macarena C.

Here are a few tips for asking questions effectively on Twitter.

Keep Questions Relevant

The types of questions you should ask will depend upon the way you normally use Twitter. If you use it in a personal way then almost any question will work but if your use of Twitter is more focused upon exploring a topic or niche, or if you’re using it for business – you’ll want to keep your questions at least somewhat on topic.

Acknowledge Answers

Simply asking questions and ignoring the answers is something I’ve seen a number of Twitter users do as a strategy for building up follower numbers. The problem with this is that it can leave those who answer feeling a little ignored. Of course it is difficult to respond to every person who answers (last time I asked a question on Twitter I had 100 responses – it would have taken over my day to personally respond to each). A few ways of acknowledging answers that go beyond replying individually include:

• a general ‘thanks for your answers’ type tweet
• picking a few responses to retweet and highlight as key answers
• use answers publicly – for example you could pull the answers together and use them (or at least some of them) in a blog post (see below for an example of this)
• summarize findings – for example if you ask people a ‘yes or not’ question tweet the results – eg: ‘13 people said yes they’ve tweeted from the toilet and 16 said that they hadn’t’

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Photo by Macarena C.

If I had to list my top 10 ways that I’ve grown my own Twitter network – somewhere towards the top of that list I would share this simple – yet powerful tip.

Ask Questions

The act of consistently asking quality questions on Twitter can have a massive impact upon your network. Here’s 6 reasons why questions are so powerful:

1. Questions Signal to Followers that you are Interested

So many people use Twitter purely to ’shout’ at their followers. They rarely make space for people to interact. Questions send a signal to your followers (and potential followers) that you’re not just on Twitter to have a monologue – but that you’re interested in dialogue and conversation.

2. Questions Prompt Conversation

I find Twitter to be most effective when conversations evolve on it. One of the best ways to ‘get people talking’ is to ask them a question – particularly if it’s about themselves and their experience.

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In this post Chuck Westbrook (follow him @cwestbrook) looks uses the analogy of Dinner Conversation to explain the basics of different types of communication on Twitter. Image by Thomas Hawk

Twitter is a lot like a dinner with a large group of friends at a big table in a busy restaurant. Everyone is chatting, there’s a lot being said, and if you’re not focused on a particular conversation, it sounds downright noisy. So just like a large group setting in real life, there are some conventions about how people tune in to listen and the most effective ways to be sociable.

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Today Grant Griffiths (@GrantGriffiths) from Blog for Profit writes about using Twitter to find links to read (and how to share links with others).

Like many who publish a blog or read blogs, twitter has become a part of the morning routine. We jump on twitter sometimes before we even open our email programs. What are people talking about and what are the hot conversations taking place is usually what we are looking for.

For me and others, twitter has become a major source of what we read throughout the day. I have actually discovered recently, not only do I go to twitter some days before I open my email program. Twitter is scrolled through before I open my RSS reader, NetNewsWire.

Collecting Links to Read on Twitter

Over the last few weeks, I have found a large chunk of what I read being provided by the links of those I am following on twitter. Many of those I follow tweet links to blog post or articles they are reading. And most are sending their own blog’s RSS feed to twitter.
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I really enjoyed the post from Sonny Gill yesterday exploring the idea of Broadcasting vs Conversing on Twitter. I think he’s on the money and new Twitter users can learn something from his suggestions – however I wanted to ask the question today:

Is it OK to use Twitter as a Broadcasting Tool?

The reason that I ask the question is that while my main Twitter account (@problogger) is pretty interactive – my secondary one (@digitalps – one connected to my photography site) is not – it’s almost purely used as a broadcasting tool.

Not only do I use it for broadcasting – I don’t follow anyone with the account and yet it still has over 1000 followers. Every day a new tweet automatically goes up on the account pointing to a new post on my blog and every day that tweet sends around 100 people to my site).

While I suspect if I were to use that Twitter account more conversationally that it could be even more effective (it is one of my goals at some point) at this point I’m relatively happy with how it’s working – particularly considering I’ve never really promoted @digitalps beyond a couple of tweets and a single post on my blog.

The other reason I ask the question today about using Twitter as a broadcasting tool is that as I look at the top 10 users of Twitter (in terms of how many people follow them) I notice that 3 of the top ten also use Twitter purely as a broadcasting tool. They have 117,025, 51,030 and 36,168 followers.

While they are either famous or have incredible reach in other ways already – they’re sustaining massive amounts of followers and never really interact with any of them (at least not publicly).

I’m not writing this post to suggest that we should all just use Twitter as a broadcast tool – but I guess I wanted to say that it can be done quite successfully – in some circumstances.

So When is it OK to use Twitter as a Broadcasting Tool?

Let me suggest a few times that ‘broadcasting’ might be appropriate on Twitter:

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“How much do I need to Tweet each day to build a successful Twitter presence?”

I get this question a fair bit from new Twitter users and while I think Tweet frequency is an important topic (one I’ll cover in a future post here at TwiTip) I think that there’s another more important aspect of successful use of Twitter that I’ve not heard many people talk about…

Silence….. (cue the crickets and tumbleweed).

Regular tweets may well be an important part of successfully using Twitter but one thing that I’ve found equally important is regularly ‘not tweeting’.

Four reasons come to mind:

1. Pausing in your tweeting creates room for your followers to respond

I once ‘followed’ someone on twitter who tweeted so much that as one of his followers I felt as though he really wasn’t interested in interacting with me because he was really having a conversation with himself. There was no real room for me to say anything because he tweeted so fast and on so many topics that – well I wasn’t needed.

2. Pausing in your tweeting can keep conversations from getting muddled

Tweet too quickly on too many topics and conversations quickly become muddled and confused on Twitter. The problem is that followers see your tweets at different times and respond to them as they see them. As a result you can be getting replies to multiple tweets that you’ve done all at once. Tweet too much and you can forget what you’ve tweeted.
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A few months ago I asked my Twitter followers why they loved Twitter. This video is a compilation of their responses.