Twitter Newbie Help
If you are new to twitter, welcome aboard! Twitter is defined as a “succession of chirps as uttered by birds” which is actually quite fitting as the social networking site Twitter.com provides a platform for users to send a succession of short messages (140 characters) to other users who are have requested to follow them, the short messaging is known as microblogging and has grown massively over the past few years. Twitter has grown consistently in much the same fashion as Facebook though is not as widely adopted and has less of a following, Twitter provides a potential tweeter access to some ~190,000,000 registered users, huge opportunity to collect some fans to your website, blog or business page.
I remember the first time I heard about Twitter, a couple of years ago a plane crash landed in the Hudson River, a tweet titled “There’s a plane in the Hudson”, I remember being amazed that the news being incredible at the time, the fact that a normal user had caught wind of this before the major news networks did and they were reporting using his photos! It was time to investigate further for me at the point.
Understand the concept
Simply creating a profile on Twitter is not likely to get you anywhere, to be successful with twitter you need to proactively use the site, tweeting to others and retweeting as well as following friends, businesses, specialists and people of interest from your niche, actively pursuing this model will provide a steady fan base of ‘followers’ who will then receive your tweets.
Define your priorities
You will need to decide the intention of your profile, be it personal or business, it would be wise to differentiate between the two, using your personal profile to retweet promotional messages for your business might loose you fans, from time to time this is acceptable, but not to much.
Get personalized
Twitter allows you to customise the profile background, which if done right can make your profile look smart, also providing perhaps some more information about the profiles intention and perhaps if it’s a business a logo.
Find like-mined people
I recommend at first, follow others in your area, observe the etiquette that is micro blogging, learn what your potential audience would retweet and what they actually like to read of twitter.
Provide value
Twitter has been built to allow you to share, not sell products, you can try this approach, it does work for some, but your followers would prefer useful content, which is both informative and useful. As an expert in your field what ever that might be they expect quality from you in some form or another.
Twitter has plenty of spammers and self promoters running scripts which will automatically publish their content to twitter, a great time saver, but don’t forget doing just this is neither personal and could lead to a loss in genuine fans. It’s important to maintain a balance between personal tweets, informative tweets and those with perhaps a commercial theme.
Listen to others
Awesomely twitter allows you to track and monitor performance of your outbound content, this means you can track the conversion from twitter.com to your own site or tweeted content, it allows you to improve on your conversion and provide the content your fans want to see.
Importantly, I trust the thing that makes a person or enterprise worth following on Twitter is authenticity, being able to follow a peer or someone in my field without being bombarded by spammy self promoting messages or automated junk messages makes up both my followers and those I follow.
Have a go, participate, what have you got to loose? Have you recently joined twitter or remember the hurdles you had to overcome when you started out? Please feel free to share your experiences in the form of a comment below.
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cc licensed flickr photo shared by londondan
Very good basic information here. Thanks for sharing it.
Thanks for the tips! I’ve been using Twitter for about 6 months and have good results. For a blogger it’s a great tool to promote new posts and get traffic fast.