Twitip

‘How do I get followers on Twitter?’ – it’s a question it seems everyone is asking. In this post Jo-Lynne (follow her at @dcrmom) shares some tips on being the kind of Twitter users people want to follow.

Hi. I’m Jo-Lynne and I’m a Twitteraholic. Yes, I’m unashamedly and unapologetically addicted to Twitter. I use Twitter to build relationships, to keep connected to the outside world, to distract me from the housework, and to find articles and information that I wouldn’t discover otherwise. I choose carefully whom I follow on Twitter. As with any other social network, there are ways to grow your community. In Twitter-speak, this means to gain followers. I’ve put together this list based on the characteristics of the people I most enjoy following on Twitter.

1) Be Interesting

It’s fine to announce what you’re doing and thinking and what you had for lunch, as long as you do it in a way that is entertaining to your followers. Twitter is micro-blogging, and like on your blog, if all you do is give a play-by-play of your mundane daily happenings, you will lose followers. The people I enjoy following find a way to make me smile with their quips and one-liners, even if they are just informing me what they had for breakfast. Here are a couple of examples from the past few days.

@subdiva could have said, “Packing to go to Disney tonight!” but instead she wrote: “Packing up to ring in the New Year on the happiest place on earth. No, not the wine store…”

@rocksinmydryer could have said, “I hate dieting” but instead she wrote: “May I just say, for the record, that PORTION CONTROL STINKS? Thank you, that is all.”

Of course not everything you post has to be clever, but if you’re just sharing your thoughts and happenings, try to make it worth reading.

(more…)

Curious about the Twitter Favorites feature and how people use it? Ari Herzog, a social media consultant providing strategies to business and government leaders, offers some tips below that everyone should consider. You can follow him on at @ariherzog and on his blog at AriWriter.

If you visit anyone’s profile on twitter.com, you can click a link marked “Favorites,” but I’m willing to bet you don’t have any.

After browsing through recent TwiTip articles, clicking on commenters’ Twitter ids, and clicking into their “Favorites” links, I can guess with fair accuracy that a mere five to ten percent of everyone reading this sentence is actively favoriting tweets.

Am I close?

There are many reasons to favorite a Twitter message, just like you might digg or stumble upon a web page, bookmark something into Delicious, or even favorite a YouTube video. But if you do the rest, why don’t you do it here?

I reached out to some of my Twitter friends to gauge their usage.
(more…)

When you’re starting out with Twitter it is easy to make mistakes and put potential followers off-side. In this post Jenny Cromie (follow her at @JennyCromie) explores 8 ways to tick off other Twitter users.

Image by ohhector

Have you ever been to a social networking event and watched someone make a complete fool out of themselves? It’s like watching a car wreck in slow motion. Or like listening to a violinist who doesn’t know the difference between an A flat and and A sharp. It’s painful.

The whole point of a social networking event is to get to know people and build relationships. But if you don’t have a handle on the right social graces, you’ll make the wrong kind of lasting impression.

To the uninitiated, Twitter may seem like a collection of random conversations and annoying mini marketing campaigns. But the Twitterverse is really a big community that you build up around you. And as with most communities, there are certain rules—spoken and unspoken. There’s etiquette on Twitter—or as I like to call it—Twittiquette.

People new to the Twitterverse can’t help it if they make a few social gaffes now and then. Because they simply don’t know what they don’t know. In these cases, social missteps are forgivable. I made a few myself when I first joined up. One time, a new follower thought I was a bot. A bot I most certainly was not, I told her. I just couldn’t figure out the status updater I was using and ended up pinging my poor Tweeps with multiple announcements about my latest blog post (my belated apologies again, Tweeps).

But there are others who have been milling around the Twitterverse for a while and they clearly should know better. These are the folks who you would never ever in a million years want to run into at a chamber of commerce event. In person, they would probably corner you for a half hour or more and talk at you about how fantabulous their company/product/service is and why you should give a gosh darn.

And if you haven’t figured it out already, some of these folks are mingling about and icking up the Twitterverse too. You might even have a couple in your list of followers. Or <gasp> maybe you recognize yourself in one of Twitter types below.

In any case, here’s my list of the eight most difficult Twitter types. The kind of folks that you want to unfriend, unfollow, and unTwitter.

And hey—if the shoe fits, I trust that you’ll know what to do. Or if you are guilty of some of the below but simply are in denial, I hope for your sake that one of your Tweeps will be kind enough to pull you aside via Direct Message and tell you to knock it off already!

(more…)

In this post Mark Hayward (follow @mark_hayward) provides some habits of effective Twitter users that beginners can use to help expand their network. If you have other “effective Twitter user traits” for beginners, please feel free to put them in the comments.

Do you think that people who are able to successfully expand their network using Twitter share any habits or common traits?

If you had asked me six or seven months ago, “What is the value of Twitter?” I probably would have responded with something to the effect of, “Itís a great way to let people know when you are making coffee or sitting in traffic.”

However, after quite a few months of participating, networking, and most importantly, learning, I am now a firm believer that when used properly Twitter can be an extremely powerful addition to a comprehensive social media strategy.

For the newbie Twitter user it can be difficult to know where to begin or how to constructively increase the number of followers, and as such, I drafted this post with the beginner in mind. People like you and me who are somewhere between ëjust creating a profileí and a couple hundred followers.

Also, if you are like me, I am assuming that you want to be an active participant and wish to grow your network for collaborative or creative opportunities. Specifically, you would like to use Twitter as an online tool to connect with people all over the world.

With the above in mind, and until someone (Google, Chris Brogan, YOU?) creates an algorithm that will quantify “effective Twitter users,” my analysis is based on watching the Tweeting habits of regular users and not only the elite “Twitterati.”

10 Traits of Highly Effective Twitter Users

So, subjective as it may be, my observations over the past couple of months show that there are some common characteristics amongst those who seem to be effective users of this service and they are as follows: (more…)

In this guest post Dan Hollings (@dhollings) takes a look at 6 Questions that are often asked about Twitter and gives a comprehensive introduction to how to use Twitter effectively. Grab a coffee, sit back and enjoy.

How to light a candle under your Twitterings for both Newbies and those that think they are Pros…

How silly! I’m preparing to share some powerfully useful and advanced Twitter tips, yet I start with a warped variant of a well known children’s nursery rhyme. What’s up with that? It’s simple…

At the core of Twitter is a concept so simple, even a child can do it. Yet almost every newbie who arrives at the Twitter site is overwhelmed with a variation of the following thought:

“What the…?”

My interpretation of this flummoxing phenomena suggests that most folks (newbies or not) are really asking:

1. Why should I Twitter?
2. How do I Twitter?
3. What do I Twitter?
4. How do I get followers?
5. Can I make or raise money with Twitter?
6. and… OK, I’m ready to start, what’s next?

(more…)

This video has been around for a while but I wanted to include it for those new to Twitter who might need an introduction.

Thanks to the team at Common Craft for putting it together.

In this guest post George Angus from TumbleMoose.com (follow him at @tumblemoose) talks about an aspect of using Twitter that I think many new Twitter users will relate to – the need for patience.

I dragged myself kicking and screaming into the world of Twitter. For the longest time, I just didn’t get it. Follow people around that I didn’t even know? Really? With 140 characters worth of what they were doing? More importantly, why on earth would anyone care about what I was doing? Well, I gave it an honest try and now I understand.

Twitter is part of my daily routine. I see the light and the advantages are obvious. Twitter referrals to my website are trending upward and I’ve had opportunities present themselves that otherwise would not exist. My strategy has been pretty simple: Use the medium as it was intended.

Image by Essjay is happy in NZ

Sales or Snails

There seems to be a couple of schools of thought in terms of making the most of the Twitter experience. One camp employs a strategy of following as many folks as possible. For these Twitterers it’s all a numbers game. It’s a lot like sales. Anyone who has been there will tell you that sales is all about numbers. The more faces you can get in front of you, the more sales you are going to make. I guess that’s fine for some people, maybe that strategy works best for their Twitter goals.

I think the slow and steady road will lead to long term success. For myself, I figure I’m in it for the long haul. Dad always told me that anything worth doing is worth doing right. That’s worked for me so far.

(more…)

Today Mark Ramskill (@ramskill) from SubHub, takes a look at some of the steps that new Twitter users can go through to get going.

Twitter, having been quickly adopted initially by key influencers, has grown into a mass-market communication tool, with millions of users.

If you’re publishing content, undertaking online marketing, and looking to keep up with the latest trends in anything web related then Twitter should be featuring highly as a ‘weapon of choice’.

In this article I’ll be assuming you are new to Twitter, and that rather than wanting to use Twitter as a way of simply keeping up with friends, you want to use it as a tool for valuable engagement and maximum effect, avoiding the white noise that Twitter can also create if used incorrectly.

I call this ‘Using Twitter, the Smart Way’.

(more…)

How do I set up a Twitter account? Sometimes those of us who have been using Twitter for a while forget what it was like to start out and work out how to get going. So when Nate Moller of MollerMarketing (follow him at @MollerMarketing) asked if he could write a beginner post on how to set up a Twitter Account I thought it would definitely help those starting out.

What is Twitter?

“Are you in to bird watching or something?” asked one of my Facebook friends once as I made a Twitter post about my 1,000th “tweet”.

Twitter is a free social messaging utility for staying connected in real-time.

Wikipedia describes it this way:

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service, that allows its users to send and read other users’ updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.

Before I get in to too much detail on why twitter is such a great part of online marketing, I want to teach you how to set up a twitter account.

Step 1: Go to http://twitter.com.

When you get to Twitter.com, you’ll see this page:

(more…)

“Why do you use Twitter? How does Twitter Benefit You?”

I’ve been asked these questions so many times since starting TwiTip that I thought I’d write a post answering it. I hope that it’s helpful for those of you just starting out with Twitter (or considering getting involved).

Twitter has changed the way that I use the web and connect with others online in many ways. Those of you who’ve traveled with me on my Twitter journey since the beginning know that I started out very skeptical of the medium.

It always seemed like a waste of time – however once I started using it I immediately began to see its potential and some tangible benefits to me. Let me try to break some of them down:

1. Research Tool

(more…)