Twitter tips

Use the ‘bio’ section of your twitter profile
Fill with relevant keywords and a decent overview of yourself or business. Examples: ‘I design book covers’ isn’t as good as ‘Apple Mac Graphic designer in UK who specialises in book covers’. This is useful for people searching for others to follow.

Don’t speak at people, communicate with them
If you follow someone back then expect to respond to their replies if they are not offensive. People often fail to understand that good dialogue is part of business (or just being nice!) and thus should be used on twitter when possible.

People will understand you can’t respond to everyone if you have many hundreds or thousands of followers. However this isn’t the case for the majority of twitter users and some fail to understand the twitter service completely. Either not responding to people or doing so via direct messages (privately) when there was no need.

Don’t alienate people in the attempt to try and create an image. Don’t follow people back if you don’t want to respond to their replies is a good practice. It is okay if you were busy for quite a while and are late responding.
The numbers game
Don’t try and add four thousand people, send out product updates and then wonder why twitter disable your account or nobody is interested. Choose a few people to follow for a while before you start writing twitter messages. Gain a better understanding of twitter and try and widen the content you tweet when you do. Slowly choose a number of people to follow and over time a number of people will hopefully choose to follow you.

The RSS feed
Have another blog such as blogspot or wordpress? Why not grab your twitter micro blog rss feed and place it on the other blog (in a side column for instance). Visitors to your other blog will see this feed and some who use twitter may choose to follow you on twitter.

Manage your time
There is software available that will automatically notify you when people have updated, this isn’t always good. Twitter can quickly become addictive and you can get carried away very easily. Treat twitter like email, check it regularly, but don’t let it have an impact on productivity if checking during the working day or spending time with others.

To begin with, just use twitter via your browser if able. Then try software for the iphone, blackberry or desktop that provide instant updates. Only once you have learnt to manage your twitter time.

Consider how many people you actually do want to follow
Some people follow everybody back that follows them and jolly decent that is! However consider how many you actually do want to follow. When someone follows you and you are notified, read their twitter messages before making a decision.

Be careful what you tweet!
Don’t think your competitors, colleagues, family or friends are reading your tweets?

Don’t lose track of why you are using twitter and be weary of what you tweet. If you are using twitter for personal use, then don’t think someone you work with or know won’t look you up. Don’t believe others won’t discover that drunk2much is actually you if you regularly mention your company name, location and other details to identify you! Worse yet, that colleague you just complained about, might of also just read the complaint!

Be extremely weary of letting off steam on twitter. It might be inappropriate and also not truly represent yourself. A twitter comment you wrote in anger can be quickly deleted, but might already have been read by others.

Replies

Also regularly checking ‘replies’ is useful as you might receive messages from people who are not following you.

Right that is enough twitter tips from SBT. We welcome all feedback and your twitter tips.