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Top 7 Twitter Tips – How I Use Twitter

I often get asked about Twitter – how did you build up that following, how can I build up a following like that, how did you get to be so good looking? I made that last one up.  I have sent the exact text below to several people that have asked me about my Twitter methods, and thought it would make for an informative post.

There are a range of factors/tools that allowed me to build my network on Twitter.  I can tell you it was 100% natural – no automated services helped me acquire followers.  I do send auto-DMs, and there was a short time where I was auto-following back people that followed me.  That got ugly though – spammers used it against me.

My Top 7 Twitter tips:

1.  Be on Twitter alot – tweet things that are interesting – be active.

2.  Interact.  Don’t just tweet famous quotes and links – interact with people.  Answer their “@” posts to you with a “@” post back to them. I rarely follow back anyone that doesn’t appear to interact with people via the “@” reply.

3.  Be helpful to others. It’s not all about you.  Retweet, recommend others, offer assistance when you can. The 80/20 rule is in effect!

4.  Follow interesting people.  And you don’t need to wait for people to follow you in order to follow them.  Follow the folks that are interesting to you and hope that they’ll follow you back.  This point is key, and I talk about it more below.

5. If you follow some folks, and they don’t follow you back after a week or so, it’s OK to unfollow them.  In fact, Twitter has limits on how many you can follow.  You need people to follow you in order for you to follow others.  If you want to hear more about what these limits are, let me know.  Long story short, I would give people a chance to follow you back.  If they don’t, it’s OK to unfollow them.

6.  If someone follows you, give them an honest chance on the followback – I am personally flattered when a real live person follows me – I will manually go check out their account (when I can keep up with this) and will seriously consider following them back.

7.  Truthfully, if it is important to you to keep your follower numbers up, following back does help.  Otherwise, they may unfollow you, since you didn’t follow them back.  They’ll follow the advice I gave in #5 above.

I think one of the main bones of contention that some people will have with these tips is with #4.  There is a school of thought that following a bunch of people in the hope that they will follow you back is unnatural, spammy, and gaming the system. I have had people tell me that directly about my account.  Here’s the deal on this – think of a real-life analogy.  Almost every single real-life human relationship that you have today started out on an uneven footing, i.e., someone made the first move.  You extended your hand and introduced yourself, or the other party did.  You either reciprocated and shook their hand, or you turned your nose up and gave them the cold shoulder. Most of the time, you’d shake their hand.  You may not end up being close friends with them, but that’s how you meet people.  The only time this uneven footing thing isn’t true is if you get introduced to someone by a third party.  In this one case, a new relationship was christened with zero effort by either party.  The third party did the work, and you two just stood there.  The rest of the time, someone does that initial outreach.

Twitter is the same way. If you see someone that you find interesting, follow them.  You can go further and say hi to them with a “@” reply.  They’ll either follow you back, say hi back to you, or both. Or neither!  There is nothing wrong with making the first move here.  And if you want to do it on a large scale by following a bunch of people, that is OK.  Twitter allows that – it’s an advantage that Twitter has over real life!

The takeaway for entrepreneurs is this – Twitter is my number one sales channel, and the tips above helped me get there.

Businesses on Twitter – You Have One Extra Rule To Live By

Can anyone guess what that rule is?  Drumroll please……….. . . . . ……….. you cannot randomly click on links sent to you in Direct Messages!  I will explain why below.  I am certain I could flesh this point out in greater detail, turning it into a full-blown how-to for businesses on Twitter.  But for now, allow me to point out something very important to you.

If you are a business on Twitter, you actually have several extra rules that you must live by.  You probably shouldn’t curse too much, call people names, fight with anyone, engage in even light racism, solicit sexual partners, fence stolen goods, or talk about how your farts smell.

And if you’ve hired a Social Media agency to handle your Tweets, you have to make sure they understand this, as well. Anything an agency is doing for you… they are doing it in your name. This should be second nature to them.

The pic below should illustrate how potentially jarring one small errant click can be.  I received the following Twitter DM from a CPA firm.  I blurred out their particulars just because it felt like the right thing to do.  If I were to click on the link they sent me, it would commandeer my Twitter account and send a bunch of these links to a bunch of my followers.  So someone handling the CPA firm’s Twitter account clicked on a similar link that they had received in a DM.  It’s a standard Twitter phishing attack.

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Ultimately, does this reflect really poorly on the CPA firm? That’s debatable – if you’re new to Twitter and aren’t aware of these phishing attacks, you might receive this message and say, “WTF is with this CPA firm?”  You might even unfollow them. But then I thought, the text of this attack is so outrageous, I think most people on Twitter “get it,” and therefore would not hold it against the sender. My guess is that this conservative CPA firm wishes that this had never happened!

Why, then, do these phishing attacks continue to work? Why have I received this exact DM over 50 times in the last two days?  It’s because people keep clicking them! Note that all you have to do is click – with many of these phishing attacks, you do not have to provide them your password – click, and they just steal it from you.  Clever, isn’t it?

You wouldn’t think that one click could get you in this much trouble. But if you’re a conservative CPA firm, or an office supply company, or even a funny t-shirt website 🙂 , you cannot afford to besmirch your good name by falling victim to a phishing attack. (Full disclosure: months ago, I clicked on one of these. It sucked!)

I suppose this advice is applicable to all of the Twitterzens on Twitter, but it carries special importance for businesses with brands to protect – stick to business, and stop clicking on random links in DMs!

——— POSTSCRIPT ———

As I was completing this blogpost, I received the apology you see below.  It came 90 minutes after I received the first offending DM. Out of the 50+ sex-related DMs I have received in the past two days, this is the only apology so far. I don’t need an apology, but these people obviously care about their business, and I applaud them for that.

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Help Others and You Will Help Yourself

The 80/20 rule – you’ll hear about this when Twitter experts talk about the best way to use Twitter.  Spend 80% of your time promoting others and talking about topics other than yourself, and spend 20% of your time on the things that matter to you.  Many Tweeters question the need to do this – some don’t understand it, some just don’t do it.

Why would I spend time helping someone else on Twitter? What am I going to get out of it?

Google serves as a great example to me of “helping others is really helping yourself.”  They have introduced so many free productivity tools, and I think that, notwithstanding the firestorm surrounding Google Buzz’s privacy issues, people really appreciate them for it.  When they give all this cool stuff away for free, they’re buying something for themselves.  When you promote the awesome new blog post of your friend, you are figuratively given a chip that you may be able to cash in later.

Besides that, it’s just good karma!