Twitter: How Not To Win Friends and Influence People

So you’ve got yourself a Twitter account and you find yourself following people left and right and excited when someone follows you back.

Ok, let’s step back for a second for those new to Twitter and just go over some of the lingo.

To “follow” is to add someone so that you can see what they are tweeting or talking about. When you are “followed” by someone else, it means (or could mean) that people are interested in what you have to say. Yay! Well, ideally it means they are interested in what you say.

It seems a lot of people will just follow people because they want to be followed in turn and have a whole lot of followers. Which is great if that’s what interests you but what you are left with is a whole bunch of disjoint tweets and a lot of noise.

However, if you truly want to make effective use of your ‘twitter time’, follow people who share relevant interests and with whom you can engage and participate in meaningful conversation.

So I’m following interesting people and have some following me back. Now what?

Well, here’s what you shouldn’t do:

1-Blatantly self-promote:
Nobody likes a self-promoter and social media is about everything but that. It’s about building relationships first : engaging with the people who are interested in your brand, subject matter and business, second.

2- Be fake.

Be genuine. Be real. Use your authentic voice. Most of the people you interact with online with you will never actually meet therefore in order to have meaningful online relationships you really need to be yourself. This will attract more followers and raise your credibility as a veritable source.

3-Bombard your followers

If you are constantly pushing out new content and new links you may overwhelm your followers. Sometimes less is more and if you are constantly tweeting you actually may be overlooked. Tweet value and your followers will seek you out.

Twitter has been likened to a cocktail party whereby you will talk to a lot of people, filter out a lot of information and personal stuff that you don’t really care about (while pretending to be interested) but ultimately takeaway some useful bits of information that will help you.

Be conscious of the points above and you will stand out above the crowd.