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Top 10 Tips For New Twitter Users

Written By Marcelo Lewin

Your friends are on Twitter. Your son talks about Twitter. The news mentions Twitter every other minute. Even your mom is on Twitter. But did you know who’s on Twitter that can affect your business? Your competition.

It doesn’t matter what you do, what industry you are in or how big (or small) your company is, you should be on Twitter engaging with new leads, checking out what your competition is doing and finding out what people are saying about you and your company.

Twitter is the world’s largest “cocktail” party and like all cocktail parties, there are some rules you need to follow so that you are accepted, become popular, attract the right “followers” and ultimately convert them into leads.

Below are my top 10 tips for new Twitter users (Top 10 music kick in now please):

Tip #10 – Provide useful and value added information.
No one really cares if you are drinking coffee now, if your kids just left for school or if you have a headache. Twitter is about providing tips, customer service and useful information that people can use on a daily basis. For example, if you are a photographer, provide daily tips on shooting better photographs. If you are a mechanic, provide daily tips on how to keep your car maintained properly. Providing these tidbits (in under 140 characters of course) that people can walk away with and use daily will keep you and your services in their mind space, and soon, you’ll be able to convert those leads into customers when they need your services.

Tip #9 – Listen to people first.
Like every cocktail party, if you walk up to someone and immediately tell them everything about yourself and what you sell, they will be turned off. In the Twitterverse, this is exactly the same. Don’t jump in and start “selling”. Listen to what people in your industry are doing and what they are looking for. Then jump in and provide useful information, but only if it adds value (see the tip #10).

Tip #8 – Participate in conversations.
After you’ve listened to people and understand what they like (and not like), jump in and start new conversations and participate in current conversations by adding your expertise. Answer as many questions as possible. Be honest and be passionate about what you offer. The effort you put in now to nurture these relationships will come back to you as business.

Tip #7 – Earn trust
I’ve always been taught that you earn trust, you don’t automatically get it. In Twitter, you have to multiply that by 100. You build trust by providing useful information on a daily basis, by answer questions honestly and without bias, by being transparent, by apologizing in public when you (or your company) did something wrong and by giving kudos to people that do great things (e.g. company partners, great employees, fantastic customers and yes…and even your competition). Once you have the trust of the Twitter community, they will seek out your services.

Tip #6 – Quality over quantity.
It’s not about how many “followers” you have; it’s about having relevant followers following you. What do I mean by “relevant”? That depends on your industry and whom you are targeting. If you are a catering company, maybe you want to attract people that just got engaged or throw a lot of parties. Perhaps you want to attract companies (or people) that you want to partner with (such as wedding photographers and videographers). The key is to have relevant followers. It’s better to have 2000 qualified, focused, relevant followers, then 100,000 generic people you know nothing about and may not be interested in what you offer.

Tip #5 – Seek out people that are “influential”.
As tip #6 stated, finding relevant people is very important, but finding “influential” people that are relevant to your industry is even more important. It’s much better to have 1 or 2 followers that are influential (known in your industry, have many relevant followers themselves) then to have 100 people that ultimately, can’t influence anyone.

Tip #4 – Give it away for free.
Provide as much useful information as you can for free and I promise you it will come back to you in the form of business. Social media is all about sharing and interacting with people. The more you share, the more transparent you are, the more people will want to “follow you”. Soon, you will be the “influential follower” that everyone wants to friend.

Tip #3 – Market indirectly.
Once you’ve earned the trust of the Twitter community, have become an influential person in your industry and have provided enough useful and value added information, you will be able to “indirectly” market to people your services and products in between your informational Tweets.

Tip #2 – Do not SPAM.
There are plenty of spammers on Twitter already. You can easily recognize them. They usually follow hundreds (if not thousands) of people, but only 10 people follow them (and those are usually fake accounts they created). They always link to their site, never offering any useful information. They don’t interact with other users in conversations. It’s always one way. Do not become one of those people. If you follow tips #10 through #3 above, you won’t be a spammer. Don’t start with tip #3 directly.

Tip #1 – Don’t expect to tie a Twitter entry to a Balance Sheet entry.
If you are the type of person that expects an immediate ROI after Tweeting for a week, then Twitter (and in fact, all of social media) is not for you. You will not be able to tie a specific Twitter entry to your balance sheet. It just doesn’t work like that. Twitter is a pre-sales tool that allows you to create relationships and nurture them to the point where you can convert some of those relationships into customers.

I hope this article has encouraged you to take on the leap on Twitter. Twitter is not only fun (and free) but it’s a great tool that allows you to build relationships with potential new customers, allows you to nurture the relationships of current customers and allows you to see what your competition is up to.

Join the Twittervolution today! If you are interested in learning more about Twitter, you can take one of our free Twitter webinars or you can, of course, follow me at Twitter.com/NewMediaDude for daily tips about new media.

Twitter, LinkedIn Cut Deal – We’re Still Waiting for the Big Announcement

Written by Marshall Kirkpatrick / November 9, 2009 9:00 PM

Twitter and LinkedIn are announcing a deal tonight that will allow LinkedIn users to publish status updates to their Twitter profiles and pull in some or all Twitter updates to their LinkedIn accounts.

Wait a minute…the two social media companies with some of the most valuable, interesting data on the web made a deal and what do we get? Spammy Twitter streams clouding up our LinkedIn feeds and an occasional uptight Tweet on Twitter that was born inside LinkedIn? We’re still waiting for the meaty announcements everyone says are coming someday soon – that Twitter and LinkedIn are open for business.

I don’t mean to be too grouchy, but this looks like just one more sweetheart Silicon Valley deal that has limited imagination and represents a lost opportunity for the kind of innovation everyone expects these kinds of companies to drive.
In the announcement video recorded by LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman and Twitter’s Biz Stone, both talked about how Twitter is great for business. What did they mean, though? They meant it’s a marketing platform, a way to get your message out further, etc. If you have something you want to say to everyone on LinkedIn, why not say it on Twitter too?

But is business just about broadcasting your marketing message? What about the listening part of doing business, thoughtful analysis, responding to actionable information and market conditions? Conversations with your customers and business partners?

Twitter is arguably better for listening than it is for broadcast and conversion of marketing messages. This kind of cross-posting deal falls short of the huge potential latent in the data both of these companies control and instead appeals to the craven broadcast-model of marketing. Challenging that broadcast-model is where many people believe social media derives its meaning.

What could this look like? It could look like an option to view the employer and job title of anyone you see on Twitter or through a 3rd party Twitter interface. It could look like Twitter opening up its fire hose for unfettered 3rd party analysis and development – then you’d see social graph and content analysis done that gave a big boost to the User Experience on LinkedIn. (“This LinkedIn user has been conversing with friends on Twitter who were talking about ‘mobile,’ ‘Wisconsin’ and ‘gaming’ over the last 2 weeks.”)

Whatever the case may be, both occupational data (LinkedIn) and social messaging data (Twitter) are rich green fields for mashups and analysis – but these two companies are holding back the tide of innovation by refusing to offer a clear path to their data by outside partners.

LinkedIn partners with next to no one. Only large, established organizations like Business Week, the New York Times and now Twitter get access to LinkedIn data. Other services all around the web will tell you stories about reaching out to LinkedIn for API access and getting the cold shoulder.

We wrote about this concern three weeks ago (“LinkedIn Hits 50 Million Users; Still a Roach Motel“) and the company told us then and today that big changes are coming to its API soon. That’s great. That’s something to look forward to, if cautiously. We’re years into the LinkedIn Platform today and there’s only a select few partners doing anything there so far.

Likewise, Twitter is fabulously open with its data in some ways (on a per-item basis) – but it’s leaving a substantial number of outside developers frustrated because they can’t get their hands on the full feed of Twitter data (the fire hose) to analyze. Startup companies that do appear to have relationships with Twitter tell us things like “We won’t describe our relationship with Twitter to you and neither will anyone else who has one.” That’s charming. It’s unclear whether anyone but Google and Bing have access to all the Twitter data.

Twitter investor and real-time web guru John Borthwick told us in another conversation today that he believes Twitter is just in its early days as a company, that there’s nothing mysterious going on. “I’m hoping there will be a click-thru EULA [End User Licensing Agreement] to the firehose [someday],” he wrote. (Emphasis added.)

That sounds good.

So everybody’s working on the wide-open web that so many of us want to see? Standards and APIs and open platforms to facilitate a new era of innovation are right around the corner?

Sounds great. For now though what we get is a little cross-network message broadcasting. Hopefully it’s just the beginning.

© 2003-2009 ReadWriteWeb

Posted by Garett Rogers @ 9:07 pm

Today at the Web 2.0 Summit, Marissa Mayer announced Google’s partnership with Twitter to bring the search engine real-time search results. Just hours before Google announced the partnership, Microsoft released their own Twitter search tool on Bing.

Instead of being simply a way to search tweets, Google is planning to improve their existing search results by incorporating real-time observations. Here is an example Marissa gave in the official blog post:

The next time you search for something that can be aided by a real-time observation, say, snow conditions at your favorite ski resort, you’ll find tweets from other users who are there and sharing the latest and greatest information.

This new feature isn’t available yet (whereas Bing made their Twitter search available immediately after their announcement). Google says it should be ready in “the coming months”.

Garett Rogers is employed as a programmer for iQmetrix, which specializes in retail management software for the wireless industry. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.

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via blogs.zdnet.com