You’ve heard so much about Twitter and how to tweet, schedule, run tweetchats, etc. You may be running your own account, or managing one for someone else. What best practices still apply? Here are some things I’ve learned over about six years.
Talk To People
I’m tired of saying to engage, so I’ll put it another way: talk to people. Chat with them, thank them, share things with them, retweet their photos, read their articles and blogs, laugh at their jokes. You know—just like you would in real life! As Derek Silvers mentions in his video, there’s A Real Person A Lot Like You on the other side of that screen. Shoutout to my best friend Bridget Willard (@YouTooCanBeGuru) for that video.
Use Lists
Lists are a greatly underused feature on Twitter. If you’re interested, here’s my post about lists for power users. To see a great example of someone effectively using lists, take a look at Toyota Equipment’s (@ToyotaEquipment) lists. While you’re there, consider following them and subscribing to a few lists. You won’t regret it.
Discover The Discovery Tab
If you click on the Discovery tab, while you’re on Twitter, you’ll see a mix of popular tweets and tweets from those you know and like. It’s an easy way to find content to retweet, see what’s trending among friends, and catch up quickly.
Employ Hashtags
A hashtag helps you organize your tweets, find others’ tweets, have a decent tweetchat, and mock your own tweet. It has even evolved into something else, as this fab article from the New York Times, In Praise of the Hashtag, points out.
Retweet With An Image
If you want to be a super resource, tweet someone else’s link, but add an image! This super charges their tweet, and makes both of you look good. Here’s the how-to directly from Twitter. It takes maybe 15 more seconds to do.
Report Spammers
Twitter is a community. Reporting spammers helps everyone. Most spammers don’t last too long on Twitter because they tend to get shut down fairly quickly. Wouldn’t it be nice, though, as Hunter Walk says, if Twitter closed the loop and told us how our efforts stop spammers? Yes, it would be.
Follow People
Don’t be a snob. You don’t know who people know. For instance, there’s a contractor who doesn’t follow me back because I’m not in his neighborhood. Little does he know I live about 10 miles away from him! And I run accounts that would retweet his content and probably also use his services. I tend to follow anyone who looks legit if their content is at all interesting. I don’t follow bots, spammers, porn accounts, or repetitious accounts.
Join Tweetchats!
Want to know who’s real and who talks? Join tweetchats in your area of expertise and interest. For fun, you could even engage in some way outside your usual area. If you’d like to join mine, it’s #DigiBlogChat (Tuesdays at 1 p.m. PST). Here’s my post about how to participate in tweetchats.
Believe In The Power
Twitter isn’t all unicorns and fairy dust and glitter. But you can meet real people. You can discover your own deeper interests, keep up on the news, enter contests (if that’s your thing), or even donate a kidney, as my buddy Amy Donohue (@TheFabSocial) did. (Her tweetchat on live organ donation is #KidneyChat Mondays at 7 p.m. PST, by the way).
What’s Your Favorite Best Practice?
Did I forget one? Probably. What’s yours?