Most companies have joined Twitter by now but there are a few that have lagged behind. If you’re a part of this group (as my company was), it can be really intimidating to jump into the social media scene when your competitors already have established accounts with hundreds (or thousands) of followers. I used these techniques to jump my new account from 0 to 350 followers in one month, bypassing the awkward infancy period of a new Twitter account almost entirely.

Why should you care? Getting an established account is the best way to attract new followers, and even more importantly, more interaction with your followers and a quick intro into your local Twitter community, driving communication and clicks through to your company’s website.

Set up the account

As soon as possible, grab your business’s name on Twitter if it’s still available. Mine wasn’t, but luckily the account was inactive and we were able to file a copyright request, releasing the account over to our name. If this isn’t possible, grab an available username as close to your business’s name as possible. Avoid underscores and dashes as much as possible.

Design your twitter account to look human, like the @zappos account does above. One of the best ways to do this is to add a custom background with someone’s real picture — preferably the person tweeting from the account but you can use the founders/CEOs of the company as well. Stock photos are worse than having nothing at all. Customize the colors and the rest of the background to reflect your company’s branding.

Before any promotion of the new account, write twenty tweets to fill out the first page, spacing them at least 15 minutes apart from each other. Thereafter, continue to tweet every day, 4-5 times at max for the first few weeks, and taper (if you wish) after. We want the account to look active and get that tweet count up as fast as possible without spamming. A great tool to use is CoTweet, so you can spend 10 minutes in the morning setting up your tweets for the day, spacing them 2-3 hours between each other.

Very important: Make sure your tweets are high quality and useful to your audience. At the end of the day, your account is to promote your business, but will be more follow-worthy if you interact with the community and post about other items of interest in your field. I usually try to have three or so posts per day promoting our website, one retweet (varying between native retweets as well as non-native which can add commentary), and one link out to something interesting elsewhere. You want to emphasize that you’re a real person, not a robot.

Acquire followers

Now that you have a follow-worthy account, it’s time to get followers. It would be easy to just let this happen naturally, but I’ve found that accounts with high follower counts are more desirable, and therefore attract more people. So while the goal is to get a high number of interactive followers, we’ll start out with finding twitter accounts (ideally in the same field) that auto-follow back.

The best way to do this is to use an online application called Tweepsect, built by my friend @shazow, that analyzes a twitter account’s “stalkers” (those that follow but the account doesn’t follow), “stalking” (those that the account follows without following back), and “mutual” (mutually following).

Find other businesses in your field on Twitter and inspect them using Tweepsect. What we’re looking for here is the “mutual” list, and then we can scroll through those mutually following accounts and find those that have nearly identical following/follower counts — sure sign of an auto-follower. Follow every one of these accounts you find for a very quick boost to your following count; if it’s over a hundred accounts, follow only about 50-100 per day to allow for your own following count to rise.

You can start promoting the account once you’ve reached about 100 followers: for example, write a post on your company’s blog, add links from your website and Facebook pages, tell your employees to promote it via their twitter accounts, etc. Why didn’t we do this first? People are more likely to follow an established account.

Bonus: Lists are another great metric, and still a fairly new feature. Use this to your advantage — inspect the lists that your competitors appear on and follow those that create those lists. Usually these creators will add your account to their lists as well. You can also go to Twibes.com and add your business’s account to lists in as many terms in your field as possible.

Find the community

Once you’ve completed these steps, it’s now time to find people in your field to follow and interact with. As large as Twitter is, I often have trouble finding where the good communities of people are. Tweepsect again comes in handy here — we used it before to find auto-follows but now we can use it more generally. Take a look at the “stalking” list in addition to the mutual list to find who other businesses in your field are following. Watch out for inactive accounts, designated on Tweepsect with a face next to account — these accounts haven’t been updated in 90 days.

Another great way to find those in your field is to use Twitter Search. Search for relevant hashtags of topics: #education, #gardening, #marketing, as well as related topics: #onlineeducation, #organicgardening, #ppcmarking, etc. Search for these topics once daily to get a snapshot of others in your field that are promoting that conversation on Twitter. While general topics are hashtagged fairly rarely, conferences almost always have a hashtag for the attendees. Specifically in the education space, #educon occurred about two weeks after we created our Twitter account and it provided a great resource of people to follow in our space.

If you find some really great accounts to follow, I would recommend creating a private list to stick these people on. As your account grows larger, it’ll become impossible to watch the feeds of 300+ people per day. Stick the highest quality accounts into one list and read that instead every morning.

Continue growing and interacting

Hopefully at this point, your account will have the valuable combination of a high amount of followers that also interact, placing yourself directly within the Twitter community and on the same level as your competitors. It’ll be a lot easier to coast your Twitter account since people finding your account will be more likely to subscribe – give months later, the account has more than 800 followers.

Any other tips? I’d love to hear them in the comments!

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.



Jump-Starting Your Company’s Twitter Account

A subtly confusing aspect of Twitter, even for people who have been using the service for a while, is understanding the differences between replies, mentions and direct messages. These concepts are confusing because they’re different than E-mail and aren’t necessarily the same as on other social networks like Facebook. The goal of this piece is to help well-meaning people from inadvertently annoying others on Twitter, or worse, accidentally sharing private information publicly.

This is part 2 of a 2 part series about replies, mentions and direct messages in terms of how they’re used from the Twitter web interface (Read part one here). Today we’ll talk about mentions and direct messages.

Mentions
A mention is when a Twitter @username is included anywhere within a tweet. Think of it as a way of tagging someone in your tweet. For example “I can’t think of a wine shop that uses Twitter more effectively than @BinEndsWine“.

Every user who follows you will see this tweet because it doesn’t begin with an @. Each user mentioned in the tweet will see it in their Twitter feed -and- it will also appear in their list of “Tweets mentioning”.

How to use mentions:

Mentions are a great way to flatter people and to endorse other Twitter users. They’re also a great way to critique a business in such a way that your followers see it -and- it catches the business’s attention.

For example, if I wanted to give Comcast grief for not fixing my sister-in-law’s cable television service I could say “Hey @ComcastCares, I’m really bummed to hear that you’re not taking care of @DCSas. Step it up!” Comcast would see this, my sister-in-law would see this -and- everyone who follows me would see it.

How not to use mentions:

Unless you’re sure that you’d like all of your followers to see your response to another Twitter user, it’s better to use a reply than a mention.

Things you may not have known about mentions:

• Twitter itself didn’t always support a “Tweets mentioning” mechanism, however several Twitter clients have for quite a while. People generally want to know when people are talking about them so it makes sense that Twitter now collects mentions to make it easy for us to see what people are saying about us.
• Mentions are subtly powerful. Facebook recently implemented the ability to mention people in a status update as well.
• If someone mentions your username without “@” you will not see it appear as a mention. Sometimes, when someone has something negative to tweet about a business or a person and they don’t want the other party to know, they might intentionally leave off the “@” -or- mention you by name instead. There are ways to “listen harder” on Twitter if you’re keenly interested in knowing what people are saying about you.

Direct Messages

A direct message is a private form of communication between two Twitter users. There are several different ways to send a direct message. The most common is to click on a username in your Twitter feed and then on the right side of the page you’ll see a hyperlink to “message”:

Click on that and a box will appear that will allow you to type a message that will only be visible to that user and will not appear on the public timeline:

You can also send a direct message by beginning a tweet with “D username”.

How to use direct messages:

Direct messages are great for when you want to keep certain information private, like your E-mail address, phone number, or the fact that you’re out of town.

How not to use direct messages:

Direct messages aren’t threaded in any way, so if you’re replying to something someone said with a direct message, always provide context.

You can only send direct messages to someone who follows you. If you would like to send someone a direct message in response to a request they’ve made for a response via direct message, it’s acceptable to send them a reply requesting they follow you so you can send them a direct message. But understand that this restriction is in place to avoid people getting spam direct messages they don’t want.

Things you may not have known about direct messages:

• There are services that people use that trigger automatic direct messages whenever someone follows them. Be aware of this when sending someone an authentic direct message shortly after someone has begun following you as it may be mistaken for an automated message. If you really want to thank someone for following you, consider a reply mentioning why you followed them or respond authentically to something they say.
• The default setting on Twitter is that a direct message triggers an E-mail notification. Consider whether your direct message is urgent enough and in need of privacy. A reply may be more appropriate.
• Some people think that Twitter direct messages could eventually replace text messages.

Question of the Day: What other nuances about about mentions and direct messages weren’t obvious to you when you first started using Twitter?

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.



Concise Guide to Understanding Replies, Mentions and Direct Messages on Twitter – Part 2 of 2

Let me cut to the chase. You DO NOT want to be sued on Twitter.

Being sued already stinks enough. Trust me. I know all about this because I’m a lawyer and I sue people for a living (don’t hold it against me).

But being sued for a tweet is even worse.

First off, think of what your friends will say.  “Hi John, have you seen Bill lately?” “No, he was drunk-tweeting so he got sued.”  Imagine the harassment you’d experience at the hands of your buddies.  I shudder to even think about it!

Second, imagine what your customers will say when they read about it online and the headline reads, “Drunk Twit Gets Sued For Tweets.” Think they’re going to hire you again? Probably not.

Worst of all, you could lose your privilege to Tweet under Twitter’s Terms of Service. And that would mean the end of world undoubtedly.

So how do you avoid this?  I’m going to show you 10 basic ways to avoid being sued on Twitter. Now, most of this is common sense.  But, as you know, “common sense is not so common.” -Voltaire.  So let’s dive in.

1. Take Your Mother’s Advice

Remember when your mother told you not to say anything if you didn’t have anything nice to say. Well, (as usual) she was absolutely right! Say the wrong thing and you could be staring down the barrel of a defamation lawsuit. Do you want to get sued? I didn’t think so.

2. Avoid “Twitter Rage”/Blow Off Some Steam

I will be the first to admit that I’ve experienced what is known as “Twitter Rage.” This is what happens when I receive: (i) gobs of porno spam; (ii) block tweets (multiple tweets from the same person within a matter of seconds; and the ultra-nefarious (iii) auto-DM.

Sometimes I lash out at the offender with a particularly pointed public tweet. But in the majority of cases I’ll just block or un-follow the person and that’ll be enough to satisfy me. When the behavior is truly egregious, however, and I’ve had a really bad day (usually because of another lawyer) I find ways to blow off some steam.

I’ll usually go for a run or go to the gym and lift some weights. This typically does the trick. For you, it could be doing yoga or picking up the phone and calling a friend. Whatever it is, I highly recommend that you do something relaxing and totally unrelated to the tweet.

But if you insist on making negative comments about other people you should at least consider doing the following . . .

3. Send A Direct Message Instead of a Straight Tweet

Sending a direct message to the person instead of a public tweet is important for at least a couple of reasons. First, you may find that the person made a mistake. For example, I once chastised a person for sending 4 tweets in rapid-fire succession. I later learned that the person was using a third party application that went haywire. Boy was I glad that I sent that person a direct message and not a public tweet!

The second reason it’s important has to do with defamation law. You see, unless you communicate the message to a third person it will not be actionable as defamation. Lawyers call this “publication,” and it’s an indispensable element to a claim for defamation.

4. State Your Opinion Instead of a Factual Assertion

The First Amendment is a Twit’s best friend since it protects opinion. So all you have to do is tweet the magic words, “In my opinion . . . ” just before any statement, right? Wrong. What most people don’t know that is that an opinion can also get you in trouble for defamation if it implies a provably false assertion of fact. Basically, the court is going to look at all the circumstances surrounding the statement and then make a determination. So tread carefully here.

5. Don’t Use Your Name As Your Twitter Handle

The law values the right to anonymous speech. One of the best ways to remain anonymous on Twitter is to use an alias or a penname. Now, don’t get me wrong here. I am NOT advocating that you engage in any shenanigans.  All I’m saying is that if you are especially critical of a certain company or an individual, you may not want to use your name as your Twitter handle.

6. Check Your Sources

Factual assertions lead to lawsuits. Therefore, you must verify whether your factual assertions are accurate, if you are making any. And don’t rely on just any sources. Seek out credible and unbiased sources and keep a record of what you did to investigate the facts included in your tweet, if possible.

7. Lay Off The Booze

Not too long ago I thought I would be cool and tweet about my friend’s bachelor party. This could have lead to DISASTROUS results. Fortunately, a good friend persuaded me not to do it. Consequently, what happened in Vegas stayed in Vegas. Bottom line: don’t drink and tweet (not even a glass of wine, it’s just not worth it).

8. Don’t Violate Copyright Laws

This is pretty simple. Just don’t do it. Twitter takes this very seriously. They even have a special email address an aggrieved copyright owner can use to contact Twitter: copyright@twitter.com

9. Don’t Violate Trademark Laws

Twitter reserves the right to “reclaim usernames on behalf of businesses or individuals that hold legal claim or trademark on those usernames.” Did I mention you might get sued as well by the rightful owner of the trademark?

10. Don’t Impersonate Another Person

This is the fast track to a lawsuit, especially if you impersonate a celebrity. You will get sued if you do this. Again, just don’t do it. The worst part is that people usually do it for the “sake of comedy,” and it rarely ends up being funny. OK, the guy impersonating Shaq was pretty funny. But that’s the exception, not the rule.

At the end of the day, it’s important to remember that you are solely responsible for what you Tweet so be very careful.

I really enjoyed writing this article for you and I look forward to reading and responding to your comments.

Adrianos is licensed to practice law in California only. This blog post does not constitute legal advice, nor is it intended to create an attorney-client relationship. Happy tweeting!

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.



10 Ways To Avoid Being Sued On Twitter

Let me know what you think if you’ve tried any of these tools, and if you have any you’d like to share (or any posts you’ve written on your own blog related to Twitter) please don’t hesitate to let me know about them!

• Twitoria – Many people seem to have re-discovered this one recently, as it’s been mentioned here on TwiTip before. You simply enter in your Twitter username, and select a time frame from the dropdown. You then see the number of people you’re following who haven’t updated their Twitter stream in that time. Fortunately most of the people I follow are regular updaters, but this tool is helpful in trimming down your list if you’re so inclined.
• Tweet4Blood – An interesting concept, for sure. “Using tweet 4 blood you can tweet your blood requests to followers @tweet4blood who are donors. Tweets are also hashtagged city wise for easy finding. You don’t have to login to tweet it from here. But make sure not to spam the community.” Currently seems like it’s mostly used in India, but I can see how it would be easily spread around the world.
• Print Your Twitter – Since Twitter’s archive only goes back so far, using Print Your Twitter allows you to save the history of your Twitter account, favorite hashtags (#topic), and so on, right down to your computer. What were you doing a year ago on Twitter? Find out by checking your own personal archive.
• Followformation – Helps users quickly follow dozens of categorized Twitter users. This tool is meant for Twitter users that would like to make sense out of following. For new Twitter users, this can be especially intimidating. Followformation helps the social media newcomer simplify the first few steps by dividing the top people on Twitter by categories, and automating the entire following process.

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.



Sunday Link Roundup: Blood Donors and New Tools

Photo by SanFranAnnie

Picture yourself in the crowded party shown above. In a party without chairs, little clusters of conversation form, and the makeup of those clusters changes quickly as people wander around. You may join a cluster because you know one of the people in it, or because you happen to overhear something interesting. Parties like this are sometimes called “mixers,” which the dictionary defines as “a social gathering where people can make new acquaintances.” Twitter was the biggest mixer in the world until Tuesday, May 12, 2009, when those conversations fell silent.

The @replies Option

Until recently, Twitter had an “@replies” option that determined which replies you saw. The choices were so confusing that it needed an explanatory link, but even the explanation was confusing! Let me use a diagram to illustrate the choices and what they meant.

Consider this scenario: You are following A.

A replies to B: “@B blah blah”

The question is, do you see that reply or not?

If your setting was “all @ replies” then you would see the reply.

If your setting was “@ replies to the people I’m following” then you would see the reply only if you also followed B.

If your setting was “no @ replies” then you wouldn’t see the reply even if you also followed B.

It is important to note that this has nothing to do with someone replying directly to you. It’s all about replies to other people.  And the fact that I have to add that shows that even with a diagram, my explanation is tricky to understand.

The Curtain Falls

Apparently, these options were not only confusing; something in the way they were implemented was actually causing Twitter to bog down. Remember, Twitter was not originally designed with replies in mind; replies were a user-driven convention which they added. But this means Twitter’s underlying infrastructure couldn’t keep up with things as the number of users increased. I suspect that the competition between Ashton Kutcher and CNN Breaking News to get a million followers was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Kutcher has 1,793,588 followers as of this writing, so when he posted a single reply, the Twitter software had to make millions of decisions.

So on May 12, Twitter changed things. There was no longer an option: We now see replies only if we are are also following the recipient. In the diagram above, if you do not follow B, you will not see the reply. While this change may have been necessary for technical reasons, the practical outcome was that it largely ended Twitter’s function as a mixer or cocktail party. You now only see general statements, or replies to your personal clique (the people you are following).

Let me illustrate the problem with an actual conversation about the change. I alerted my friends with a tweet reading, “FYI Twitter just made it so you can no longer see replies to people you don’t follow.” I received the following reply from my friend Julie, or @astrowebgirl:

This is a common misunderstanding about the original options, and about the change which makes it a very important question. I replied,

I think this was a useful exchange that might have benefited many people. So how many people saw it? In days past, many of Julie’s 1,737 followers would have seen her side, many of my 375 followers would have seen mine; anyone who was curious could click through to explore the other side, possibly finding an interesting new person to follow. That is a potential audience of 2,000 people.

But I really doubt that we have any followers in common. So the number of people who saw this (besides myself and Julie) is probably a big fat zero.

Right there, I think you can see how Twitter has been unusually beneficial in the past at transmitting information and enabling new connections. Less so today.

So Now What?

There was an immediate uproar in the Twitter community about this, largely through the #fixreplies tag and also through blog posts. And it seems Twitter got the message. They cannot simply restore things because the old options really were creating problems, but they have promised to develop a new feature that will let us see more tweets again.

That’s the good news, and it is good news. Until then, there are a few things we users can do:

• Be aware that you are not seeing all tweets.
• Occasionally click on people’s profiles to see their replies to people other than your friends.
• Be aware that if you post a reply, very few people will see it.
• If you want to reply more publicly, do not click reply or begin with @username.

That last point deserves an example. If I tweet something that you want to reply to, but you want your reply to be seen by people who don’t follow me, don’t click the reply arrow in the Twitter web interface (or whatever you do in your client), and don’t begin your message with my username, @jonmreid. Instead, start typing a regular tweet, and use some characters as a prefix at the beginning, such as “> ” which people are used to seeing in email replies. I suggest two characters,  something and a space, to keep your name clickable in all Twitter clients. For example,

> @jonmreid Thank you for explaining about @ replies. I look forward to seeing what new thing Twitter implements.

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.



Twitter WAS A Cocktail Party

I’m interested today to hear about how people came up with their Twitter user name?

My personal approach with @problogger was to use the brand and name of my blog (of the same name). I know many others have taken this approach, with their blog, website, business, product etc while others choose their actual name (or some variation of it). Others still use nick names while others invent names that they’ve not used before – just for Twitter.

How did you choose your Twitter user name? What considerations did you weigh up in that choice?

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.



Twitter User Names: How did you Come Up With Yours?

So what do you do when you really want a Twitter account but the account is inactive?

I was recently confronted with this issue when setting up this very blog. While I registered TwiTip.com early in 2008 with the hopes of starting a Twitter Tips site – I never considered registering @TwiTip as a user name here on Twitter. When it came to launching this site it dawned on me that it would be useful (and logical) to get the Twitter user name.

The problem is that it was already registered and had been for months. The frustrating part was that it was completely inactive – not a single tweet had been made. They hadn’t followed anyone and didn’t have any followers. This meant that direct messaging them wasn’t possible (you have to be mutual followers of one another to do this).

As I began to research if there was a way to get Twitter to hand over unused Twitter accounts I soon found out that there were many people with the same problem as me. There were also quite a few different opinions on whether it was possible to get these types of accounts released.

How to Secure an Unused Twitter Account

The good news is that there are a variety of ways to get an unused Twitter account. Lets start with the official response from Twitter.

A few days back I asked CEO of Twitter Evan Williams (@ev) for Twitters response to this problem. Do they release unused user accounts? Here’s his response:

“In our view, it does no one any good to take a Twitter username and not use it. So we do free up unused accounts on occasion.

(For example, we’re freeing up the unused @algore, so Al can use it instead of al_gore.) We have a rough guideline of 9 months of non-use.

However, it depends on the historic use of the account. Also, we don’t delete inactive accounts, we only rename them to free up usernames, so there is no data lost.

To inquire about the availability of a name, contact Twitter support.”

OK – so it is possible – but it can take 9 months and it is only a ‘rough guideline’. Also – Twitter support can be a little slow to respond – I did email them about my predicament but after a few days with no response I began to wonder if there was another way.

Note: if you want to find out how long a Twitter account has been registered simply type ‘WHOIS username’ into the update field on Twitter and you’ll get the information brought up on the screen like this:

What other methods do people have at their disposal?

The way that I secured TwiTip was to do two things. These won’t always work – but they are worth trying.

1. Follow the account name and then @reply to them

When you follow someone it is likely that they will be sent an email to notify them of their new follower. This relies upon them not switching the ‘notification of new follows’ option off – but considering that it is left on by default there’s a reasonable chance that they’ll at least be notified of them having a follower. The hope is that they’ll then login to their account to work out who it is and why they followed.

2. Ask your followers for help

Shoot out a request to your followers to see if anyone knows who owns the account. You might just get lucky.

3. Check the URL for the user name

It may be that you own the corresponding .com URL for the user name – but there is a chance that the person with the usename owns it. See if the URL is registered. If it is contact the owner of the URL to see if they own the username. If the site is registered but not in use do a WHOIS of the URL to find the owner contact details.

Also check other URLs similar to the username.com. This might sound a little too much – but as it turned out in my case – the person who owned @TwiTip had registered it because it was similar to another URL that they’d registered (they had registered a number of similar Twitter accounts).

Add Your Suggestions

I’m sure others of you will have other experiences of securing unused Twitter accounts and I’d love to hear your ideas and experiences.

PS – How my Story Ends – My story ends happily enough. I tried options #1 and #2 above and it was #1 that seems to have paid off. The person who had the account also had @Twittip (double ‘t’) as well as www.twittip.com and was happy to release them to me as a trade for a little of my time (consulting).

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.



How to Secure an Unused Twitter Account