Twitip

Commenting, replying, asking, sharing, and helping are among five tips you can use to overcome Twitter block, wrote Mark Havenner last year.

Each tip is valuable and chock-full of simple advice, such as this bit on the importance of sharing content in Twitter:

Make it a habit to simply share what you find as you find it. Link retweets are the most popular type of tweet for a reason. Most people are there to find news and websites, and if you post interesting things people will notice you more.

But Mark missed something more valuable than sharing and asking and helping. He missed quitting. A sure-fire way to overcome Twitter block is to stop using the social networking service, to take a break, to quit. (more…)

Have you been ignoring your followers?

Your followers took the time to check out your profile and thought you were cool enough to follow, but how are you treating them in return? Have you allowed your large number of followers cause you to develop Twi-lebrity Syndrome? Suddenly, you’re too good to respond to or retweet anything and you think everyone should stop what they’re doing and retweet your tweets? If so, then you’ve probably begun to notice that for some strange reason the number of your followers are dropping. Why? Because you’ve been ignoring them. (more…)

Before you continue any further, retweet this post. Please. Pretty please? I’ll be your best friend!

Ok, maybe I have to speak your language… “Plz RT!” Did that work?

How about if I retweet all of your posts? Wow, that’s a great idea – I’ll just guilt you into reciprocating!

Argh… what is it going to take for you to retweet this post?!?!

We all have to freely admit that we’d like our blog posts to reach as many people as possible. We do our best to create compelling content, bring forth new ideas and promote engaging discussion. We, hopefully, do so in a way that inspires our followers to spread the word and bring other people into the conversation. But what happens if this alone is not enough? (more…)

When I first started using twitter as a means for promotion, I thought that it wouldn’t be worth my time. I assumed that the only people that following me were other marketers pushing their products and services on me. It reminded me of a room full of salesmen trying to sell each other cars. Obviously there are real people using twitter for leisure and not for business, and I kept asking myself how I could find these people and, more importantly, how I could get them to follow me.

Here are a few things I learned that helped me find the right tweeters and might be able to help you, too. (more…)

Recently I got into an interesting discussion with @nhangen and @rockyourday about the new retweet function. While I’d experimented with it, I wanted to see how I could make it work for me. What I discovered was a plethora of posts pointing out the flaws in the feature.

• Strangers were showing up in your stream
• It was taking away from the community driven aspect of the site.
• You couldn’t add commentary

Now – these concerns are valid. However, what most people missed that this is an improvement on the old system. We now have more choice. Duncan Babbage says it best in a comment on outspoken media:

I suggest that you need to see Twitter as two separate things, an underlying infrastructure and then secondly their own web interface which is just one out of many clients that can be used for the service. At an infrastructure level, they have added a new feature that didn’t exist before. It doesn’t take away at all the capacity to continue to RT as you did before.

(more…)

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. (more…)

How we interact with others can either cause joy, pain or leave no impression at all. What impression are you leaving behind you on Twitter and other social networks?

Pain is caused on Twitter when…
- Spam and hacking occurs and we feel our safety and privacy is compromised.
- An opinion we make is “flamed” by others or they fail to get what we are saying
- We use Twitter to be negative about others. Think about high profile cases this year where it has been a case of “tweet in haste, repent at leisure” (or not leisure, in a world where reaction is global and swift!) (more…)

As much as many of us like to think that we’re highly organized and efficient when it comes to our use of Twitter, there is in fact a lot we can do to make our lives easier.

In the last couple of weeks I’ve adopted some fairly radical measures to streamline and improve my use of Twitter, which I’ll share with you here.

1 – Cut the Number of People You Follow

The temptation when you first start using Twitter is to embark on a ‘follow rampage’. You add the news sites you read, the bloggers you respect, friends, family, colleagues, business contacts and in turn many of the people that follow or are followed by these accounts. (more…)

If you want to know what’s hot, what’s not, and what the freshest news seems to be, Twitter might be the place to be on the cutting edge. However, just how reliable is the news you see on Twitter?

Just like you can’t believe everything you read in the newspapers or magazines, or believe everything you see on television, Twitter has its good points and bad points when it comes to breaking news. Twitter is populated with journalists, writers, photographers, and a plethora of celebrities. Sometimes false rumors can make the rounds, such as the reported death of Jeff Goldbum back in July, and sometimes breaking news hits the nail on the head, as in the case of the Iranian election. (more…)

After reading how you should plan out your tweets, I thought of how you can fully utilize groups when retweeting. There are many Twitter clients out there, but I use HootSuite to schedule tweets and create custom columns or groups of specific people you follow.  Creating these specific columns, which we can thank to Twitter clients, allow for you to keep tract of any tweet that you may have missed.

Think about how much time you spend scrolling through your home feed and retweeting what was just tweeted. And when you usually make that retweet as soon as the person tweeted it.  Doing this not only wastes valuable time, but it makes retweeting the content a “joke”. (more…)