Twitter Effectively: Tips & Trics

First of all, true for everything you do in life, it is important to think what you want to reach through Twitter, and what your target audience is.

What can Twitter be used for?
1. Fun: just another channel for interacting with family, friends, colleagues, your group of interest
2. Publishing great content
3. Marketing an idea, website, product, service.. yourself (f.e. to find a job).

FUN
If you want to use Twitter for fun, you have probably reached your goal already. Find your mates via Twitter's Who to Follow tool. Upload them via Gmail or another webmailer or enter their email addresses as a list. As they know you, they will follow you back. Skip the rest of this page!

CONTENT IS KING
Publishing great content is spreading honey for the bees.. or the bears! Great content is the real thing, and long-term the only thing with which you can provide value to your current & future audience. Only because of great content, they will stay with you, and will they be motivated to retweet your messages, to reply to you, to discuss your input, to follow the links you provide...

Most people or companies don't take this serious. Content is King after all. If you don't take content serious, you don't take your followers serious. That's kind of a sin, actually. ;-)

There's a lot of noise on Twitter. So, let's first assess, what's NOT great content:
- Timelines full of tweets about your whereabouts: I arrived in the supermaket. Now in drugstore. Now back home. On highway 66. Play with dog Sara. Bitten by my boy. Etc. etc. A distraction. Only interesting for family and close friends.
- Timelines full of private messages (@blahblahblah about #blahdiblah), non-understandable for the rest of the world. A dissatisfier for many. This is only good if FUN is your only objective.
- Brainless retweets. Retweeting everything that is remoteless of interest. Think of your audience, is this really something worth retweeting?

So, what's great content? Just avoiding the above leaves out the true crap, but will not necessarily result in great content.

The basic message is: try always to be original. Use your own words, your own insights, your own perspective on things. If everyone is writing in the same way, don't do it. It has no value add. Dare to be different and stand out in the Tweep masses.

Like in the traditional word great content can be
- A relevant and motivating Twitter profile
- Funny jokes in 160 characters
- News: hot and live. Like guys in Benghazi when under attack by Ghadaffi forces.
- Sharp comments on new
- Stories using the 160 character format
- Publish the title of your blogs including link to the blog
- Announcements of new news, products, services, works of art to the interested audience
- Retweets adding your twist to it
Etc. etc. The list is as endless as the variety of great content we already produce and consume. Creativity is our limit.

A GOOD PROFILE IS GREAT CONTENT
Creating a good profile is often neglected, but essential. It is in the end the most read content from your Twittering hand. Keep it readible (I dislike too many #s for keywords as it makes the text less easy to understand), list all main things you do or want to convey, and include links to your website(s), blog(s) or your @other_Twitter_account. When people decide to follow you (back), they often follow those links to better understand who you are, and decide then instantly about following you back or not. Don't underestimate the power of a good profile. If you can't say it in 160 characters, you probably can't explain it all!

CREATING A PUBLICATION CHAIN
Take care that your Tweets are automatically imported in the social networks you are using, like Facebook and LinkedIn. In this way, you can connect the whole narrowcasting chain of content, e.g.:
Your press release -> Put that on your blog/website -> Refer to it in a Tweet with a meaningful title -> Auto-distribute this Tweet to Facebook, LinkedIn and other social media.
This maximizes the chance that your target audience will get your message via the web.

EFFECTIVE EXPANSION OF YOUR TWITTER NETWORK
Given that your ambitions are beyond Fun, that you have defined clear goals with your Twitter activities, and that you have started engaging your peers and start to produce some Great Content, it is important to quantify your goals. Because, marketing is all about getting your message across, despite all the Twitter noise. And Twitter is all about conversation, not just sending or receiving.

One interesting, but complex, measure is your Klout Score. This score from 0 to 100% gives an indication of how "influential" you are by Twitter. Because it weighs the interactions you generate (messages, retweets, likes, ..), the size and quality of your network, and a few other things, improving your Klout Score puts you on the right track:
- Creating Great Content that invokes responses from your audience
- Conversating with people connected to you
- Expanding your network of followers, focusing on active and influential ones, not just robot followers.

INCREASING YOUR ACTIVE NETWORK TO ENJOY NETWORK EFFECTS
There's a threshold with regard to the size of your active network (following and followers). If you pas that threshold, you'll start to experience network effects. The network will start to produce results. You'll get interesting responses. The first level, I would quantitatively set at 500 followers (of which may be 50% or 250 are an active follower according to Klout.com).
On this level, I started to receive invitations of business partners to offer a service to them, get messages from users interested in a book I wrote, get resumés and relevant offers from potential suppliers, and start to generate some focused traffic of my target group to one of our websites (http://www.icecat.biz/).

How do I get to the level of the first 500 Followers? Remember, the first 100 followers are the most difficult ones. Afterwards, you'll be found via your network.

When you start with a new account with 0 followers, I would advise simply:
- Lookup friends, families, colleagues and other peers in Twitter and follow them. If they are not on Twitter yet, mail them to join Twitter. Directly or via Twitter.
- Use Twitter's connection to Gmail, Hotmail or other mailers to auto-generate a list of users to follow.
- Mail your friends in Facebook, LinkedIn or other social networks.

A rule of thumb is that for every four people you follow, one will follow you back. I.e., you need to follow 400 Tweeps (Twittering people) to reach the first 100 Followers.

For the first 100 followers, it is still quite feasible to do that by hand, without robots or supporting applications.
How to select the ones to follow?
- Search by looking into the list of following/followers of examples, i.e., people that match your interest profile. They are likely to follow the right people, or are followed by people that are probably also interested in your profile.
- Search by topic. Find people that match your topics from your profile, by searching via Who to Follow. (If you want to expand your network beyond the first 100, you'll need some tools to help you do this more efficiently).

If people start to follow you, ann you don't follow them yet, consider to follow them back. Many people remove (flush) now and then the one who are not following them back. If the Tweep following you, is absolutely not interesting for you, don't follow the Tweep back. Often these are robots with no network value at all, except that they try to get their marketing message across without listening to you.

YOU ARE YOUR NETWORK
There are many tools out there, that are integrating with Twitter, and provide interfaces to handle multiple Twitter accounts, e.g. Tweetdeck. In the messages you get from Tweeps you follow, you will often detect a line saying which tool they are using to automate to a certain extend the management of their Twitter account.
However, Twitter is limiting the automated following and flushing (unfollowing) of large numbers of Tweeps.
An interesting tool to expand your network is Tweepi. The free, basic version helps to Flush the Tweeps your are following, but are not following you back. It helps also to search for interesting Tweeps using some keywords. With some effort you can easily add 100s of new Tweep friends, and after a week Flush the ones who didn't follow you back.
With every tool you use, you have to keep in mind that you should only select meaningful contacts, interesting persons or organizations given their profile. Not just everyone. Because You Are Your Network! Also take care that your are not following inactive Tweeps, who are hardly doing anything with their Twitter account. Tweepi is provides insight in that aspect as well.

A more effective tool to quickly expand your network is Twiends. Twiends gives you some points, they call it seeds. If people are following you through Twiends, you'll pay at least two seeds. If you follow Tweeps through Twiends, you'll earn at least one seed. Take care that you adapt the standard settings, so that you only allow Tweeps to follow you if they have a record of being loyal (i.e., not just flushing you at the next occasion), because it is worthless to have followers who only follow you to earn seeds. If you follow Tweeps via Twiends, also take care only to follow Tweeps with similar interests - you can set these - or a profile interesting to you.
Also follow back the ones that start to follow you via Twiends, if they are interesting to you. That will consolidate the gains you make in network size, and at the same time guarantees that you stay on course to build a meaningful network.