The Bloggin’ BUZZ

Monday Madness – Q & A

Q: Help!  I keep hearing that I need to be on Twitter, but I just don’t get it.  Can you give me some tips for getting started?

Kate Leser, A Distinctive Image

A: You’re in luck!  I can help.  (Good thing…)

Twitter is a free service that is a listing of status updates.  You are only allowed to type 140 characters at any one time (remember, spaces are characters too).

The first time I heard of Twitter, I thought to myself, “Why in the WORLD would anyone want to follow me?  It’s almost like stalking!”  LOL

Since then, I joined, decided what I was going to tweet about and have grown my list to over 500 followers with many of them joining me on other networks.  Some have even become clients!  Twitter gives you the ability to send information out to people who have asked to hear from you. This is NOT a license to SPAM. I think I’m going to repeat that.

Having followers is NOT a license to SPAM.

You need to know how to conduct yourself in this micro-blogging world in order to build a community that wants to continue to hear from you.

1. Decide What You’re Going to Tweet About
Know your market. There are very few people that want to know when you’re walking down the street, getting out of your car and eating for lunch. If you have a niche market (let’s hope you do), people may follow you to know what’s going on in your market, what you’re blogging about, what you’re finding on the internet and what you think is interesting.  Sprinkle a little about yourself and you have a plan.

2. Shrink Your URLs
A common way to contribute to the Twitter community is to share links back to your blog, but you only have 140 characters available for your use! (Letting people know about your blog can be a problem if your URL is 150 characters long.)  Use a URL shrinking service.

I use is.gd, but there are many others (tinyurl, shorturl, shrinkify, abe5, etc.)

3. Share Links to Things That You Find
If you find a blog entry or news article interesting, chances are, your followers will too!  Now that you know how to shorten a URL, let people know in a tweet!

4. Retweet Other People’s Messages (RT)
It’s actually okay (recommended and appreciated) to copy someone’s tweet…but you should give them credit.  Start your retweet with “RT @name” then the tweet.  Voila!  You’ve tweeted, contributed to the community and given kudos to the originator.

5. Follow Your Friends and Mentors
If you’re just getting started, it can be a mystery…how do I find people?  If you don’t know someone’s Twitter @name, it can be difficult. To find people in an industry, one of the tools you can use is Search.twitter.com.  You can actually search for topics, key words, organizations, etc.  If you want to follow your friends, you can try finding them by typing the following into your web browser http://twitter.com/”name” – where “name” is the name of your friend.  Sometimes you can find the right person using this technique.  However, the best way to find your friends is to ask them what their Twitter name is!

…to be continued next week.

Until then…have a fantabulous day!

Deidre Hughey

Other Twitter Related Posts:
Twitter for Beginners…Part 2
Manic Monday: 5 Steps to Twitter Retweets
2 Tips for People Who Wonder About Twitter

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 19th, 2009 at 2:09 pm and is filed under Social Media 101 1/2, Tweet This!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.