How To Be Useful On Twitter Without Going Crazy

Today John Haydon (@johnhaydon) from Corporate Dollar looks at some tools to make you be a more useful Twitter user for your followers.

Image by me and the sysop

If you’ve been using Twitter for a while, you might notice that some of the most successful folks on Twitter make a concerted effort to help out their friends / followers. And they seem to ask for nothing in return!

Many folks believe, including me, that this practice of selfless giving is central to all success, personal and professional.

The problem is that no matter how helpful you want to be, no one’s invented a way to get 25 hours out of a day.

Until Now

Using a combination of Twitter tools, you can practice enlightened self-interest without the need for prescription drugs.

Following are examples of how to save time with Twitter tools to find out 1) what your friends need, 2) collecting that information, and 3) giving them that information.

Note: Don’t try this with ALL of your friends, just a few - or you really will go mental!

What Does My Friend Need?

Most of us have a general idea of what our friends need, but may have missed the few tweets about problems with a client project or thesis.

TweetStats can be used to find out details about your friend (in a non-spying way, of course ;-). After you’ve entered your friend’s twitter ID, Study the TweetCloud:

Mousing over the tweetcloud shows 49 mentions of “coffee” in Darren Rowse’s twitterings. Is this useful information? You decide.

How Can I Find It?

Once you know what your friend needs, use a combination of the following automated search methods:

• Test Keywords With Monitter.com - This snazzy tool let’s you compare the frequency of three different keywords. In Melbourne, Australia, “coffee” occurs more often than “cappuccino” or “tea”:

You can then subscribe to updates on your search using the RSS feed.

• TweetBeep works much like Google alerts, but you can combine keyword searches with location criteria. It also allows you to be alerted whenever a particular web-site it tweeted, even if the URL is shortened!

• Don’t Forget Google! Google alerts will pick up anything outside of Twitter. Set the alert to “as it happens” so that you can quickly send any valuable content to your friend.

How Can I Get It To Them?

Beyond TweetDeck, iTweet, Twhirl and Twitter.com, here are two pain-free ways to get information to your friends:

TwitThat: This is a firefox add-on that lets you quickly post the URL of a website you’re reading. The cool thing is that you can create a “reply list” of your friends in a drop down menu:

Clicking “twit” automatically posts the webpage in twitter as “@Problogger - found this:” Saves much more time than copying and pasting URLs and headlines. Also, having your friends listed in this drop-down keeps them foremost in your mind.

TwitterFeed is a utility that automatically posts updates of any RSS feed. Like TwitThat, you can also create a “reply to” prefix of tweets. In our example, we could post updates from the Starbucks blog and post them with “@Problogger - Coffee News:” at the beginning of the tweet.

This is perfect for those situations where someone is working on an urgent project and would love to receive helpful information from you, even while you’re sleeping!

If used thoughtfully (in a non-stalking way ), these techniques can help you be useful on Twitter without going mentally insane.

Tweet This

Related posts:

1. What Twitter Tools and Services Do You Use?
2. 5 Twitter Applications and Tools that Made Me a Better Twitter User in 2008
3. Using Twitter… ‘The Smart Way’

Tagged as: Monitter, TweetBeep, TweetDeck, TweetStats, Twhirl, Twitter Tools, Twitterfeed