At work we are just starting to realize the importance of social networking from a business standpoint and the potential for wild growth and viral advertising.  We have a twitter account at work that has basically lay dormant with the odd sporatic tweet here or there over the last year or so and I’ve managed to spark enough interest to revive activity and begin exploring social networking areas.  Yesterday my boss asked me to put together a little cheat-sheet or list of pointers on how to use twitter.  She is a beginner so my list needs to be tailored to someone who has never heard of twitter and has no idea how it works.  She outlined a few questions she had and asked me to elaborate on them and provide tips.  Yes there are plenty of articles already available on the net but rather than find ones that address these questions I decided to write my own as I figure if these are the questions coming from a twitter noob then others will likely benefit.

Keep It Short or Keep It To Yourself -  140 chars or less!

Mastering Twitter Shorthand – Know How To Send a Proper Tweet

This is one of the hardest aspects of twitter to master.  Get your point across in a 140 chars or less with no exceptions.  Twitter was derived as a ’status update’ type service whose intention was to allow people to be able to post simple one-liners on ‘What you are doing’.  It is acceptable on twitter to use shortforms for words, abbreviations, acronyms and other ways to keep your message short.  Using words like chars for characters and omw for on my way and similar methods are encouraged in order to keep messages short.  Avoid extra spaces, multiple periods and clutter from punctuation when not needed.  I myself am guilty of the aforementioned which is evident throughout my blog where I allow a sentence to trail off with ….. or when trying to show how excited I am!!!!!  Yes it gets the message and point across and draws attention to what you are saying but when you only have 140 characters to fit your message in you want to get into the habit of not adding extra characters.

Tweet About Stuff That Matters

If It Means Nothing To You It Means Nothing To Them

Tying in with keeping your tweets to 140 characters or less, tweeting (posting) about things of value are extremely important.  You wouldn’t announce to your entire workplace or office that you just had an enjoyable 15 minute bathroom break after lunch or that the public transit bus you are sitting on is packed with people.  Make sure that the messages you are sending across twitter have value and substance to your followers.  Take the time to remember why these people are following you in the first place and tailor your tweets to meet both your needs as well as theirs.  If your twitter account is business oriented then keep it that way.  Your followers have come to you because of the product or service you offer therefore tweeting about unrelated things will only cause people to become less interested in what you have to say.

Get Involed With Your Followers

Know How To Reply to Your Followers

One of the biggest mistakes I’ve seen people make on Twitter is not placing any value in the people that follow you or acknowledging their comments that were aimed directly at you.  A lot of times you’ll post something that has tweaked someone’s interest and they’ve replied to you or asked you a question; take this oppurtunity to gain this person’s respect by sending a tweet that is directed towards them specifically.  This is accomplished by beginning your tweet with the person’s twitter username.  An example of a twitter reply is, “@serialbox thanks for the awesome twitter article!“  The twitter system is automatically configured to separate all messages directed at you into a separate menu that is accessed via the @replies menu in the Twitter sidebar.  The reason you want to direct your messages at someone specifically by beginning the tweet with @twitterusername is simple.  Due to the virual aspect of Twitter a large portion of users have thousands upon thousands of twitter followers and are following just as many people.  With that many users to follow it is impossible to read everything that everyone says.  Your twitter page will scroll by faster than you can blink.   To make it easy Twitter has added a little reply icon to each tweet that you can click on which will automatically transfer the persons @twittername to your reply box.

Participate and Talk on a Twitter #Channel

Use Twitter as  a Real-Time Chat Service

Yes that’s right.  As everyone should know thus far, twitter is instant.  What you post to twitter is instantly seen by any number of people depending on your following and online influence.  Twitter has give us the ability to create a channel of some sort that kind of acts like a filter which separates all tweets about a specific topic in real-time.  Creating a twitter channel is easy.  Simply use the pound symbol # followed by a keyword.  This will now auto-hyperlink the keyword in twitter which will allow people to search all of twitter for tweets that contain your #keyword.  As an example I am assisting with a Twitter contest at work so we’ve posted to the #contest and #free twitter channels to appeal to people who follow those keywords.  This means that we are getting our message across not only to the direct people following our @twitter account but to all the people following the #contest channel.  That results in gaining more followers for people interested in contets and free stuff.

Turn Your Tweets Into Viral Messages

Understand the Concept of ReTweet

In this specific paragraph I am only going to touch the surface of retweeting.  Retweeting and tweets have been broken down almost into a science and there have been some great articles and websites put together that focus on how to get your message retweeted such as @problogger ’s TwitTips,  however I am only going to mention the very basics for the perspective of a new twitter user.

Definition of Retweet:  Take a tweet that someone else has posted and resend it as your own tweet and give credit to the original tweeter by including “RT @twitteruser” within your actual tweet message.

Example Original Tweet:

Example of a ReTweet:

In the above example you’ll see that @aaronabber posted on his twitter feed about a contest he is running to promote his blog.  He’s giving away free stuff.  Everyone likes free stuff.  @nikki_tikki entered the contest and was so excited about it she retweeted his contest to everyone following her on twitter as well as everyone who watches the #contest channel on twitter.  She included RT @aaronabber in the tweet which identifies it as a message that has been retweeted and that the original author was @aaronabber .  Search the #contest twitter channel and you’ll see a large number of retweeted messages.

One important thing to keep in mind when sending a message that you want people to retweet and that is to leave enough free characters in the tweet box to allow someone to add RT @yourtwittername to the message.  Count the number of characters in your twitter name and include RT @ to the count and that is how many characters you should leave available.  By not following this it does not mean no one will retweet your messages but it does bring down the likelyhood because people now have to trim your message down to give you credit instead of copy and paste.

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I look forward to your feedback and any other tips you feel should be added to this list.  Keep in mind that the list is intended for twitter users who don’t yet know what twitter is!