Are you new to the world of Twitter and wondering what you’re doing there? While Facebook is based on personal connections that have already been formed in real life, Twitter often connects people working in similar fields who have never met before based on the interest level of their posts.
So how interesting is it, really, to hear about what a total stranger (who might just be there only to sell you something) had for lunch that day?
I use Twitter for a few different reasons, and keep a work and personal account. I started my personal account to promote a travel blog I ran for a year and a half. I’m a journalist, so my work account is a must. Journalists seem to be one of the fastest-growing groups of Twitter users; not just basic newspaper and TV station accounts that post links to stories, but individual journalists themselves trying to self-promote and/or increase audience engagement or their media brand.
Engagement is key in Twitter. Your “reach,” a metric that judges your audience and impact, is influenced by how well you interact with your followers and how often your followers respond to you and broadcast your posts.
Figure out these metrics for your individual account by inputting your name into the website www.Klout.com. There are a few other websites out there that analyze social media metrics. You should check this periodically (but don’t get too fixated on metrics) to judge the success of your efforts and whether you need to rethink your strategy. Time is everything in social media; Facebook and Twitter can be huge time sucks if you don’t use it smartly.
There’s a few ways to interact on Twitter.
“Retweets” are basically reposting someone else’s post word for word. When you “retweet” a post you don’t add anything to the conversation, you just amplify someone’s post to your followers, which is theoretically a different circle than the original group of followers that first saw the post. Every post has a link on the bottom right hand corner of the tweet; hover your mouse below the text and you’ll see “Reply” and “Retweet.” After you click “retweet,” it will ask you whether you want to broadcast that message to your followers; click yes.
When someone retweets your post, it’s etiquette to say “Thanks for the RT!” or “Thank you for retweeting @(user name)”. Also, it increases your level of interaction, which boosts your metrics.
Personalize the retweet by making it a mention rather than a straight-out retweet. Mention the person who posted the link, copy and paste just the link and say something interesting about the link. That increases your retweet potential. Also, I find when someone does nothing but retweet other people’s news, my eyes tend to glaze over. I want to know what you think about it and why it’s interesting to you. Humor also goes a long way.
“Mentions” are @(insert twitter name here). They look like this: <<<@denise_or What do you think?>>> Mentions are in my opinion the most important and most powerful tool for interacting. Mentions help you engage in a conversation and get to know your followers on a more personal level.
Keep track of who mentions you through the @(insert user name here) link. In the old Twitter it’s on the right sidebar. In the new Twitter it’s underneath the “What’s happening” text box.
Mentions help avoid the impression that you’re just there to sell something. Twitter is a great way to self promote. But people are turned off by those who are obviously only tweeting to promote themselves or their brand and don’t interact with others.
Another way to interact is to use hashtags. Hashtags look like this: <<<<#oscars>>>; the numerical sign makes the word a hyperlink that is easy to search for posts that are talking about that topic. It’s also a way to amplify your reach. If you say something interesting about a “trending topic” – those top five or six phrases or words that Twitter always keeps on a sidebar – people might start to follow you.
A useful hashtag is #followfriday, a trend that keeps on trending; mention several of your followers that you recommend other users should follow and include that hashtag on Fridays.
Just be careful with how much you use hashtags. Too many hashtags in 140 characters can be as annoying as egregious self-promoters. Use hashtags selectively to best amplify your reach.
Struggling with how to find followers to add? Big users of Twitter are government agencies and nonprofits. I follow agencies at the federal, state and local level and nonprofits that I’m interested in. I also follow some businesses, especially restaurants I like or farms. After I follow a certain organization, I check out their list of followers. Though I will find a lot of news media following them as well, I search for the real people. They’re not always transparent!
It’s polite to reciprocate whomever follows you, even if you think they’re not up your alley. I will stop following posts that seem like spam after a while or if they stop being interesting. I try to weed out my followers to the real people who say interesting or relevant things or organizations that post links and news I am interested in.
So after you ramp up your followers, amplify your reach and have a lot of posts coming through your feed, how do you sort through all the noise? Because there will inevitably be a lot of noise, especially if you have more than one interest.
There are several organizational tools you can use. The first and most handy since it doesn’t involve downloading software is lists. On your profile, where all your tweets are, you’ll see a tab that says “Lists” – scroll to “Create new.” You can manage your tweets by subject area (i.e. journalists) or by whatever organizational method is most relevant to your list of followers.
There are also several programs that will allow you to manage several social media pages at once. HootSuite is popular. I like Tweetdeck. These involve installing a program on your computer that lets you keep track of and organize tweets from your followers more efficiently.
Part of the danger of Twitter is that there is so much information from so many different sources. If you don’t keep on top of it and don’t find a way of organizing it efficiently, it can become useless noise that takes over all your time. On the other side of that, you can become so overwhelmed with all the noise that you’ll drop off interacting. But if you can find a way to manage Twitter and other social media vehicles in a way that suits your lifestyle, it can be a great way of personally interacting with customers, engaging new clients and boosting your brand.
Another thing to remember about Twitter is that it is great for up-to-the-second, need-to-know news. Twitter is useful for certain kinds of “news tweeting” but not others. I don’t want up-to-the-minute tweets about someone’s first day of school, unless there’s something parents need to know about and they need quick access to that information, like the power went out or the start time changed.
But you can get real time results during election night. You can find out about a coupon deal at your favorite café. You can tweet your thoughts about a show that’s worth talking about like the Oscars. Or even what you’re seeing from your unique location about a meteor shower that people are watching around the world.
The trick to Twitter is this: no one wants to know what sandwich you ate for lunch today. But if you had a fantastic sandwich at a great restaurant that everyone should check out, find that restaurant’s Twitter account, mention it in a post and let all your followers know what you ordered.
You can get a lot of great news tips through Twitter. It’s fun to be the first to hear about breaking news, even before TV stations report it. Judging from the revolutions in Egypt and Libya, and protests happening all over the Middle East, as well as some major recent natural disasters, social media vehicles like Twitter have the potential to be game changers. Especially with smart phones changing the way we access the Internet and news about what’s going on in the world, Twitter can have a lot of power. Or it can just be a trend.
The key is defining how and why you use it for your organization or personal life, and making your use of it efficient, consistent and relevant.
— Denise Ruttan
Waldport, Oregon, August 2009