So You’ve Joined Twitter, Now What?

I recently had a friend follow me on Twitter. When I followed her back, I then saw her tweet,

“NOW TELL ME WHAT THE HELL I’M DOING HERE!”

<chuckles> So what would I tell my friends about Twitter?

If you’re new to Twitter, it’s not obvious what you should be doing. You can search for a few people you know, but then what? The answer to that all depends on what you want to get out of it and would probably help to know what you CAN get out of Twitter. There’s tons of guides how to use it, lots of tools and I’ll suggest some another time, but highly recommend starting at www.mashable.com, and follow @mashable on twitter.

The best thing is to sit back and observe how other people are using it. See who your friends follow, watch how they tweet. Be a lurker. I lurked for weeks until I figured out my place in the Twittersphere.

Reasons to use Twitter on a personal level:

Keep up with your friends and family – it’s like Facebook’s status stream, you can link to the websites you’re looking at, tweet your blog updates, share pics/video and more
Follow the news – there are some great news sources on twitter, you get the headlines and breaking stories
Discuss your hobbies and passions – use twitter search or twazzup.com to find like minded people, #cooking, #gardening, #politics, #gaming, #films, #travel, local events…
Follow celebrities and see what they’re up to – @stephenfry, @johnstamos, @kevinspacey, you’d be surprised who’s tweeting
Join a club or start a club of your own

Tweeting for a club, group or business?

I strongly suggest setting up Twitter boundries once you’ve begun getting the hang of it. Create a separate account for personal use, each business, site and clubs. There’s no limit. I have one for personal, business, and one for each other projects, totalling 4 active at the moment. When using the business account, be professional. There are many examples of businesses who really screw up via twitter.

Business uses for twitter:

engaging with customers and networking
follow industry news sources, discuss and retweet
tweeting your own news and links to new site content
building a following of potential new customers
promoting your website and building targetted traffic

Again, when you get the hang of Twitter, you might want to get a Twitter client that handles multiple accounts so you can post from your desktop or mobile phone. It gets a bit much to try to remember which account you’re logged into. Later, I’ll review some timesaving tools and shortcuts I use.

Experiment and have fun!