Twitter for n00bs: Be Useful
Welcome to the third installment of my Twitter for N00bs series. You can find the intro post here.
Today’s (well, yesterday’s really. I had a day off.) is all about proving yourself to the Twitter community once you’ve done that other stuff I’ve talked about.
- Be concise. Obviously you’ve only got 140 characters to work with, and if you’re hoping or expecting (you cocky thing, you!) people to retweet you, leave 20-30 characters space so they can credit you without altering the content.
- Variety. It’s cool that you’re linking to your blog, but don’t do just that; interact! Ask questions. Share a joke. Share a picture. Just don’t do only one thing (unless you’re a specialist account for a particular company or reason, but even then they’re pretty boring after a while). Even @MyToaster pipes up occasionally!.
- Show your stuff. You know a whole lot of stuff about law? Construction work? Kittens? Show it! There’s a phrase called “thought leadership” which is quite relevant here in that you can make a name for yourself by being the go-to person for your passion or area of expertise. Share what makes you tick.
- Hashtags are awesome! This is the aspect of Twitter which I am most asked about; “what are those damn hashtags all about?” I don’t even fully understand them myself, but there are plenty of places about which will tell you. Just don’t use too many in one tweet. It’s annoying.
- Know how to Retweet (RT). I am tempted to write a whole blog about this entirely, but I won’t because it’s over-thought. The commonly accepted format of a retweet (crediting someone with content) is:
RT @username: CONTENT
not
CONTENT. (RT @username)
Feel free to use “via” in place of “RT” when you are not quoting them word-for-word. And please take out extra usernames if there is a chain happening. Usually the username closest to the content is the original author.
- Ask yourself: does anyone really care? It’s as simple as that.
Okay, I’m done; this is my simple list. Any more to add? Come on, people! I’ve only just wet your tongue with this stuff!
May 15th, 2009 at 12:08 pm
Thanks for the heads up on leaving room for retweets. Hadn’t thought of that.
Hashtags are a great way to let people do keyword searches when looking for tweets on a particular subject. If people are looking for tweets about the TV show ‘Lost’, they probably aren’t interested in someone talking about their lost cat (though they possibly should be). So people use #LOST to show the tweet is specifically about the show.
Good post. Keep it up.