10 top Twitter tips

I put these tips together for a social networking seminar Success Network gave yesterday, and I’ve decided to share them with you:

1. Write quality tweets

It’s extremely important to write good content. If people read contributions that are relevant, educational, entertaining and useful, they are more likely to follow you. Build up your audience from worth-while tweets and try to write in full; not everybody can read text-speech easily.

2. Share content

Retweet (RT) anything you think is valuable; it’s both sociable and polite, as well as increasing the tweet’s exposure. If you want your tweets to be retweeted, write them in no more than 120 characters to accommodate your username at the beginning. Remember to acknowledge anybody that retweets yours.

3. Be sociable

Join in conversations if you’ve something good to say. Don’t just lurk in the shadows watching the world go by; make yourself more visible by contributing and people will answer and maybe even follow you. After all, Twitter is a ‘social’ networking site.

4. Monitor mentions

It’s natural to want to know if your username has been tweeted, especially as a reply to your tweets. There are various methods of monitoring this, and this phenomenon can be used for other usernames, keywords and hashtags as part of your marketing research; perhaps for a competitor, a particular service or product, a location or an event.

5. Keep to your subject

Focus on your niche or area of expertise, don’t stray into tittle-tattle or irrelevance. As you gain in experience then you’ll know how to cross over the lines, as that’s part of being sociable, but never lose sight of why you’re social networking or who you or your company are.

6. Maintain your profile

It’s important to complete your biography with a weblink and a suitable up-to-date picture. The picture ideally should be the same which you use throughout all your social networking sites to aid recognition. The bio should be succinct and contain all the relevant keywords necessary to promote your business or cause, and maybe your weblink should go to a specific landing page for your Twitter followers.

7. Be consistent

I read somewhere that the optimum number of tweets a day should be 13. This is better than tweeting furiously one day and then do nothing for the next few days. Automate your tweets to space them out through the day, and pop in now and again to acknowledge any responses and to add in extras that are relevant.

8. Get more web traffic

You can automatically feed your blog into Twitter to increase its audience, and vice versa: your latest tweets can be recorded on a blog widget on your sidebar. The more exposure you give your website’s and blog’s URLs, especially with incentivised calls to action, the more people will visit and hopefully interact. All this increased activity will heighten your SEO levels.

9. Don’t sell

Twitter is a social networking site, so don’t adopt the hard sell, or you will be blocked by other users. The idea is to make and form relationships with your followers, so that they learn more about you and you about them. Make yourself useful by tweeting linked information that would be interesting for your followers, which hopefully will be retweeted to a larger audience.

10. Find and follow

Use the friends follow pages to find new contacts. Follow someone you admire and then follow who they follow; some of them might follow you back, particularly if you have good quality tweets. The more followers you have, the larger audience your tweets will have, which makes you more attractive. You could also use Twellow.com to find more corporate followers if that helps you with your marketing research.

Alice Elliott works for Appletree which is a marketing company for up and coming businesses who want someone to ‘get the job done’. She explores social networking for increasing the visibility of businesses online, and specialises in blogging, especially for beginners and those wishing to expand the use of their blogs.