Ten Reasons I might want to follow you on Twitter
I thought it might be a good idea to write a post detailing good habits that will attract me to review and (hopefully) follow your account. I hope these tips and best practices help her ease into Twitter and discover the great resource that it can be.
1) Show Me Your Face – In my humble opinion, a good Twitter profile definitely starts with a photo. Something personal, something that tells me who you are.
2) Pick A Good Handle – your handle is going to be your Twitter identity forever, so pick something good. Something like ARE2022 doesn’t tell me anything about who you are or what you tweet about. If it’s your name, great. If it’s your area of interest, great. Just make it something other than a bunch of random characters.
3) Tell Me About Yourself – Twitter limits your profile to 160 characters so you don’t need to tell me everything, just something that will catch my eye and give me some insight as to who you are. Remember, good Tweeters are clear and concise, so this is your first chance to practice brevity.
4) Unlock Yourself – If you follow me and then make your Tweets profile, don’t expect me to follow back. I don’t follow people unless I can read their tweets. So come on….be social…unlock your Twitter account.
5) Tweet Something Useful – Give me something I can learn from. Tweet an article you just read. Tweet about an upcoming Webinar or a conference you’re attending. Give me something that I’ll find useful.
6) ReTweet Someone Else – One of the best features of Twitter is the Retweet button. When you read a tweet that you like or read an article that someone has shared on Twitter, be sure to RT it. This is the power of Twitter in that it helps me find articles that I might not have otherwise found. I look to those who I follow to provide me with great articles. It’s what I love most about the folks I follow.
7) Use HashTags Correctly – Think of hashtags as keywords that can be added to your tweet when the keyword isn’t already in your tweet. Hashtag abuse can get annoying really quickly. So, be judicious in your use of a hashtag and add them to your tweets when they are appropriate. To show an example, imagine that I tweeted something about new Twitter functionality and also wanted to make sure that those who are interested in social media were made aware of the tweet. To accomplish this, I might add a keyword like this:
Not a big fan of the fact that some people add animated GIFs to their Twitter profile photos. #socialmedia
In this example, not only will those searching for “Twitter” will find the tweet, but so will those searching for “socialmedia”. Make sense?
8 ) Follow Others Back – You don’t have to follow me. In fact, I’d suggest you only follow me if you’re interested in the things I tweet about. But be sure to follow others back who follow you. If you have 3,000 followers and only follow 50, then I consider you to be a Twitter snob. You like to be the centre of attention, but don’t like to acknowledge that other people have something valuable to say to you.
On the other hand, if you follow 2,000 people and only 300 follow you back that tells me that you are either using auto-follow software to rack up “bragging numbers” or you follow everyone under the sun, but no one else finds your tweets useful. If either of these are true, you need to seriously rethink you you are using Twitter.
9) Tweet Frequently – There is no rule of thumb as to how often you should/shouldn’t tweet. The guidance I usually give to my clients and friends is to “tweet whenever something moves you”. Something make you happy? Tweet about it. Something make you mad? Tweet about it. Did you learn something new? Tweet about it. Did you teach someone something new? Tweet about it.
You’d be surprised how often you have learning/teaching moments in your life. Share those ah-has and successes with the world.
10) But Don’t Tweet Too Frequently – I don’t care what you’re eating for breakfast. I don’t care where you’re checking-in at. I don’t care about that favourite quote (unless it’s a really, really good one). Don’t tweet just to tweet. It’s boring, clogs up my twitter feed and is a quick recipe for getting unfollowed.
Hopefully, these help some of you out there figure out ways to get people to follow you on Twitter. If you contribute to the community, help share what others have contributed, and basically behave like a human being, you’ll do well!
Enjoy and let me know if you have any additional tips that you think others should know about.