Eight Tips for Terrific Twittering

Photo by mikebaird

Last week I changed my twitter account from http://twitter.com/patdoyle to http://twitter.com/patdoyle. Sorry if you signed up for the old one – if you did, please follow me under the new one now. The reason is that I really don’t like using the “B”, as in “Pat Doyle”. I prefer being plain old “Pat Doyle”.

In doing that, I ended up following everyone who was following me, so I would not lose anyone. Checking on everyone’s tweets, I discovered a few things TO DO and NOT TO DO on twitter.

1. Don’t make all your tweets self-promotional. Don’t have every tweet be announcing your next blog post.

   I did find out from Darren at ProBlogger’s post about Twitter, about an application called TwitterFeed that will automatically post your newest post to Twitter. This is fine as long as it is not the only thing you tweet about.

   It just looks awful when you look at someone’s profile and see that every post is just a marketing message.

2. Do tweet about personal observations, questions, interesting articles you have read, etc. This helps people get to know you.
3. Don’t tweet too often. I don’t like the same person filling up my screen with their tweets. It gets to be too much.
4. Do tweet at least once a day or so, just to stay active and so people don’t forget you.
5. Do check out people that other people are replying to. I found some interesting people this way.
6. Do go ahead and follow someone who looks interesting. You can always remove people later if you don’t want to follow them any more.
7. Do get TweetDeck to organize the people you are following. I found that people get lost in the long string of tweets. This great little app lets you put people into groups so that you can see each group separately. I made groups for “friends”, “family”, “marketers”, etc.

   Another TweetDeck tip: I made a separate group for “verbose” people so that they don’t overwhelm the rest of the tweeters I am following.

   Thanks to Sarah Lewis for the tip about TweetDeck. She’s one of the interesting people that I found on Twitter by checking someone else’s reply.

8. Don’t let your twitter use keep you from doing actual work!

The hardest thing about Twitter for me is knowing what to tweet about. I feel that if people want to read my “words of wisdom”, they will check out my blog. I guess I just have to learn this by trying out different things.

Let me know in the comments if you have any twitter tips or ideas of what to tweet about.

- Pat Doyle