5 Helpful Tips for Twitter Beginners (A.K.A. tw00bs)

The “Twittersphere” can be a daunting place for first time users especially if you aren’t a celebrity or don’t have some kind of underground cult following. We compiled 5 tips you need to know before doing anything with Twitter. Feel free to implement them within your own existing strategy!

1) Twitter is About Conversation
You can’t expect to just post things on your twitter and wait for followers, you need to get out there and make yourself heard! Start following people with similar interests, mention them in your tweets, and make an effort to start a dialogue with them. If one of your new followers happens to mention you or retweet you, you have the benefit of being on their followers’ news feeds, granting you more exposure to potential followers.

2) Compliments Go a (very) Long Way
In addition to making conversation with other twitter users, make sure you go out of your way to compliment people. Tell them about why you like their services, tweet about their nice looking website, anything can help. Being nice and complimenting people will increase your exposure and will make you new friends in the process.

3) Measure Your Success
What’s the reason for your twitter account? Are you trying to increase traffic to your site or did you get a twitter because you didn’t know how else to break into social-media marketing? Either way, a successful social-media strategy consists of goals and timelines. Things like followers, hits, traffic to your site, are all good parameters to use as potential goals. Try making a 3-6 month plan and (realistically) state how many followers you want to gain in that period. There are many tools out there (Hootsuite, Archivist) that provide excellent analytics.

4) Tweet and Retweet Often
So you’ve been scheduling a tweet every now and then via Hootsuite, but are surprised you aren’t getting new followers. No wonder! You can’t expect to be seen if you only tweet once a week. Twitter users follow a lot of people and it’s not uncommon to get 50 tweets in 5 minutes. If you do post once a week, chances are that message will be buried. Tweet often (several times a day) to make sure you are being noticed, but don’t tweet so often that you get annoying to your followers.

5) Be interesting!

All in all, if you have been following all of the past 4 bits of advice, and you still aren’t attracting new followers, chances are you blog simply isn’t that interesting. But no worries! Posting links, retweeting interesting articles, and being funny are all ways to attract people to your twitter account. (Or you can go the Tyler, The Creator route and talk smack to just about every famous person you can possibly think of).

Happy Tweeting!

Luis Queral is a social-media consultant at Webconnection, a web-development/design firm in Baltimore, MD. Contact him by following Webconnection on Twitter!