Starting Out On Twitter? A Few Tips
Twitter is not the easiest social network to get involved with but neither is it the most difficult and if you are thinking about starting up an account for yourself or your company here are a few tips to help you out. This post doesn’t come from an expert with 1000s of followers but someone that is an normal everyday user on Twitter, you shouldn’t expect thousands of followers unless you want to spend every waking moment on the system.
Keep It Real
The very last thing you want to do is start faking your online identity, not only will people not believe a word you are saying but you will not gain any followers and your influence on the network will never really kick off. make sure you just be yourself on social networks like Twitter, people will get to know you for who you are and this is exactly what you or your company needs.
Make Friends
The whole idea of gaining thousands of followers is great but not something you should be interested in at all. Even if you have 40 followers that you have grown close to then you have made it in Twitter. Think about it, if your influence reaches out to 40 people that will read and listen to everything that you say then this is something you should be proud of. It is all well and good having 5,000 followers but if only a couple of them actually care about what you are saying then those 5,000 are pointless. They are also a lot less likely to do you any favours whereas close followers will always bend over backwards to lend you a hand.
Businesses, Be Careful!
If you are thinking about putting your business on Twitter and building up your social profile then I would advise caution. It only takes a couple of mistakes on Twitter for the entire social network to turn on you and your company brand to be damaged, permanently. There have been many examples over the past few years where companies have put out a message on their company profile thinking it was their private profile and they have suffered for it.
My advice is to check and double check tweets before sending them out at a company level.
Don’t Be Afraid To Follow!
The chances are that if you are not prepared to follow anyone you are just not going to keep the followers you have. You may look at Celebrity Twitter users or big companies like Disney where they aren’t following anyone but this is because they are companies and people that users want to follow naturally. Smaller businesses and individuals will need to follow people back to have an impact on Twitter.
Use Hashtags
Using the hashtag is something I would certainly do on a constant basis. For example, if you are running a competition you should always be using hashtags such as #competition and #win as there are thousands of people watching these tags all of the time. By saying that in order to enter a competition you have to follow your Twitter account you will gain at least 100-200 followers in a couple of days.
It is not all about the competition hashtags, look at the top trending topics and if they are related to you then start talking about them too!
So from one Twitter noob to another, hopefully these tips will help to get you where you want to be on Twitter!
Ryan is an internet marketer for a company that sell spy gadgets. You can find him on Twitter @ ryanogs.
Post image by kjarrett
Great tips! I am going to have to pay more attention to the hashtags, I have seen them, but haven’t really done anything with them before.
Hi Krist,
Hashtags are very useful indeed especially when running a competition over Twitter, you will find you get a lot of entrants with using tags such as #competition and #win.
Looks pretty, awesome info.it useful
dont forget to use the advanced search options to optimize your searches! And dont follow the bots!
As i am new in twitter that’s why i don’t much about it. Thanks for showing the importance of #Hashtags
Great tips there. Also, “watching what you’re saying on twitter” is very important.
Thanks for sharing such a wonderful tips, Recently i have joined twitter and these tips going to be helpful for me.
Thanks
Best Regards
Katrina Kaif