Social Media Marketing

Be As Good As Your Last Tweet

As with all social networking and social media sites, being an active participant is the key to being recognized and valued in an online community.

With Twitter, influence can be measured in part by the number of followers you attract. That does not mean that Twitter is simply a numbers game, where the guy with the most toys wins. Rather, the way to attract a solid following is by delivering good content that is useful, and to deliver it in the right way.

Status Updates

Twitter prompts you by asking, “What are you doing?” Do not type, “Reading the newspaper, going for a walk afterward.”

Tweets should include opinions, announcements and conversations.

As Joel Comm remarks in his book Twitter Power, “Produce content that’s interesting, fun, and valuable.”

Finding Content

Whether you read magazines, books, listen to radio shows or podcasts, or prefer to watch television, any media you consume likely has an online presence.

Instead of visiting multiple news sites throughout the day, I recommend using an RSS reader to follow your favorites news sources, blogs and web sites. I consume news by the bucket load every day. I use RSS feeds to follow topics in national news, business news, technology, design, and social media along with a few niche topics.

By setting up an RSS reader on your computer and populating it with RSS feeds, you create an easy way to find content of interest to you. Doing so also enables you to easily share content with people in your social network.

RSS readers commonly have sharing functions built in at the news article level. Sharing the item across any network then only takes a few clicks.

RSS stands for “really simple syndication.” It provides a news feed that the reader tool pulls in to your browser.

When you see the icon below, click on it to add the web site’s feed to your reader.

Commonly found icon for RSS feeds

The Google Reader is a very popular reader because of its simple interface and easy method for adding feeds. Google provides excellent resources for learning how to use their reader at http://bit.ly/GglRdr

Building Your Following

What interests you? Is it the latest news about a particular celebrity, athlete, TV show, or musician? Do you want to keep instantly up to date on the latest happenings in your industry, your city, or other news streams?

Whatever information you want to follow, there is a tweet stream to follow.

A good strategy is to identify two to three major topics that interest you.

Using those topics as hashtags, and search for them in Twitter. This will show all the tweets on that topic, from newest to oldest.

Another simple tip: give your hashtag context. Most people won’t actually know what your hashtag means, so give a quick explanation in one of your tweets or, if you’re making a hashtag, make it very apparent what it’s talking about.

Finally, if you’re looking to create a hashtag, be sure that it adds value for yourself and your followers. The best way to utilize them is when you need to organize information. Conferences, major events, and even reminders (i.e. #todo) can help organize specific tweets and make life easier on you and your followers.

Read through a few dozen and see if any persons stand out among the crowd. Look for frequency of postings, how well their tweets are written (do they include links and credit others when they retweet?), and how often does it seem others are retweeting the person’s original tweets?

This is not an authoritative means to evaluate a person’s knowledge on a topic, but it gives you an indication of how active she is.

Click the user name to learn more about the person. Active and high profile users (key influencers) will customize this page with their own artwork and details about themselves.

This provides a quick way to judge if you want to follow the person or not.

For example, I scan a person’s latest tweets to see if I’m interested in what they tweet about. I read their bio line and if they posted a link to a site, I click through to it as well.

In 30 seconds you can determine whether the person is a match for you.

Now that you are looking at other people’s profile to see you want to follow them, you can better appreciate why your own profile matters so much.

Follow those who look interesting, and don’t be surprised when they follow you in return. That’s common courtesy in the world of Twitter.

I typically test-drive a Twitterer for a few days to a week. If they appear to post only personal thoughts and opinions at random, or reply to other tweets with “Oh yes! Totally agree!” or other remarks that do not add value to the conversation, I unfollow them.

There are simply too many good tweets with usable content to read that I do not want tweets with little to no value clogging my stream.

People self-select over time who to follow and who to unfollow. Usage on Twitter also fluctuates so you may notice your number of followers go up and down over time, rather than a consistently upward trend.