Is There a Trick to Using Twitter?
Posted by Gabe on August 2, 2009 under Ask Gabe, Social Media, Twitter, Twitter for Beginners | 
14 Comments to Read
This is the first post from the Ask Gabe series:
I recently received an interesting question when I asked my Twitter “newbie” colleagues if they had any questions about Twitter.
“@KidsAreHeroes: I sent out a general tweet asking for a response and got nothing. Is there a trick to getting answers?”
That to me is a loaded question with the following correct answers: “Yes.” “No.” and “It depends.”
I examined this person’s profile and saw that she had 109 followers. The question she asked was definitely of a “nichey” nature. My response to her was that what she needed was more targeted followers to raise her chances of getting worthy answers to a question such as this. There are many factors involved when you send out a question.
1) How many of your followers are actually online at the time you asked it? There are many opinions as to what is the best time to tweet, but you can try it yourself by asking the question a few times at different times of the day to see which produces the best results. You must be careful not to be too repetetive or people may unfollow you. You must also consider your target audience. If it is global then you might also try a service like Future Tweets that will schedule the question in the middle of your night which is the day for many others.
2) How many people are following you? I think many new people still don’t realize that your followers and your followers only are likely to read your tweets. So if you have 100 followers, it’s the middle of the night for 50, 25 are awake but off line right now…you get the idea.
3) How many people are your followers following? If a person follows more than a few hundred people chances are that many tweets will be not be noticed at any one time. This is just simply the nature of the beast. To combat this you can retweet your own questions, but just be aware that overdoing it will be annoying to many.
4) Does your question appear to have a self-serving nature? If you have hidden agendas behind your tweets you are likely to turn people off. Here’s an example: “So-and-so said my web site was awesome! What do you think? http://spammylink.com” The number one thing you should remember about being involved with social media is the word “social”. If you connect with people they will pay more attention to you – plain and simple. I was perusing new followers’ profiles this morning and came across a particular person who had a few tweets that read something like, “New to this, bear with me.” Then he asked how to shorten a URL. So far so good. But then I saw some self-serving tweets that pointed to his web site. The sad thing is here that I don’t believe this person is a spammer per se, but he simply doesn’t know any better. Hopefully he will learn in time.
5) Who are you? That’s right, I said, “who are you?” To me you are just one of the eleventy-million people on Twitter until: a) I learn more about you in your profile, b) I read one of your tweets that interests me, c) You have engaged me in some way that wasn’t spammy. This is crucial to your success with Twitter. You must make your connections one at a time. And guess what? That takes work and it also takes time. But the time is incredibly well spent. There are no shortcuts to doing this properly. Oh sure, you can get sucked into the “16,000 followers in 90 days” scams but what do you have then? You still haven’t connected with anyone and the ones that you would like to connect with can tell that you used a program to gain followers so they won’t follow you. On top of that many people (includng me) unfollow when they see a tweet that advertises these follower schemes. Just for your knowledge here are a few relevant tweets from @spam which is the account to report spammy Twitterers to:
“If you give out your username and pw to a site claiming to get you more followers, updates often get sent out on your account.”
“Giving out your username and password to a 3rd party site promising you more followers: not a good idea! Please be safe!”
“Don’t believe the hype & sign up for ‘get followers fast!’ programs. They can be scams that steal your username and password!”
So, is there a trick to using Twitter? I wouldn’t call it a trick, just be genuine and connect with people – everything else will fall into place after that.
