How you should use Twitter

This one’s written for a friend whose tumblr blog needed a few more visitors. He asked me to help and I suggested that Twitter might be one way to achieve this. After verbalising his distaste for a few moments he came round to the idea. Here’s what we did:

  1. Created a twitter account – free and simple to do.
  2. Set the tumblr blog to automatically post to twitter. (Most blogs allow this.)
  3. Added a nice background to his twitter profile and put up a picture.

The next thing to do is get followers on Twitter. Here’s what we recommend, in no particular order, just do them all:

  • Find people on Twitter that post similar things (like fashion). Follow them.
  • Follow the people that are following the people you’re interested in.
  • Search for people who send interesting tweets. search.twitter.com is a good place to start. Follow them all.
  • Create lists of people you like. Like the PolkaSpots one here.
  • Read the tweets of the people above and ‘retweet‘ them. This sends the tweet out to the people who follow you.
  • Comment on people’s tweets and retweet them – be human.
  • Read lots of websites everyday and use the ‘Tweet Me’ button to send interesting things out.
  • Post links but not too many.

Things not to do:

  • Never follow more than about 100 people day (max) otherwise you’ll be suspended. We were stuck for ages on this one.
  • Never never never never never never use / pay for services to get twitter followers.
  • Never never never never never never send spam out
  • Never blatantly advertise yourself / services. It’s not cool

That’s it, have patience – it doesn’t happen over night.

Which Social Media Tools Should You Use

There are now so many new social networking websites popping up every day, it’s impossible to keep up and even harder to choose which ones to use.

My advice to you is: use only the ones you understand and feel absolutely comfortable with. And, if you don’t feel happy with any, go find someone who does.

Right now, I write a couple of blogs, am reasonably active on Linkedin and pretty popular on Twitter (1,422 followers and counting). We also have a company Facebook account and I’m playing with a lot of others including Posterous, Tumblr, Hunch and Foursquare.

I’m totally ignoring the rest right now as there’s a limit to what I can ingest.

Facebook is a tool I don’t agree with but it works for Public Wi-Fi. Being a Facebook idiot, there’s someone in the office that deals with all this. Don’t be scared to delegate.

You should also be realistic when choosing your weapons. For example, estate agents have to be one of the least liked people on the planet (sorry but it’s true). If you own an estate agent, do not put it on Facebook and expect to get a lot of mates, unless of course, you are pasting interesting facts about housing (maybe).