Using Twitter — How Most Do It Wrong

I’ve been using Twitter for a good few years now — first I started using it for a membership site I ran for five years, but these days I use it for my personal brand.

I learned throughout each day of using Twitter from the start the best ways to make Twitter a better experience for you and those you’re connected with there. In the transition into using it for my personal brand, I made some mistakes but I learned.

No Interaction With Others

A lot of Twitter users don’t bother interacting with others. They declare what they’re doing and expect people to like what they’ve put. Unless it’s cat-related or related to a popular franchise, it’s not likely to see much action.

1. Actionable: Engage With Your Followers

Followers hold more value than the people you have chosen to follow. Followers are people who have decided YOU’RE worth watching, and are more inclined to say hello, retweet or just have a conversation with you. And that’s what Twitter should be being used for — chatting and making friends.

(I actually feel that way for all social platforms except Google Plus — that one’s for professional networking on top of making friends.)

A way to do this is to check out your followers every day and tweet at them in reply to something they have shared or to tweet at them and ask them how their day/project is going. If you’ve too many followers to do that every day and still have room to do other stuff, then pick a good number of followers to aim to interact with everyday — once in the morning and once in the evening.

2. Actionable: Check Out Your Favourite Hashtags & Engage with Others

One of the great things about Twitter is the non-creepy way we can bust into others’ conversations. Once or twice a day, I head onto Twitter and pick one of my most relevant and favourite hashtags. I like connecting with other fiction writers and authors, so I tend to head first to #amwriting and check out the live feed for that hashtag. Those who are not retweeting, and those who are sharing something that people can respond to (I struggle to say anything to those that just belt out quotes all the time for example).

That Following Thing

A lot of tweeters like to try and get a follow for a follow. It’s not a popularity competition, guys! The people who do this are usually pretty obvious — they just shout out at everyone and don’t usually engage.

I follow a few people — twelve at the time of writing this. This allows me to interact with those I’m following if they are sharing something I can interact with. Other times, I may be sending a link their way specifically to help them with a problem they are having that they need to work around; a good example of this happened in December — one author I follow (and interact with a lot more on Google Plus) tweeted that she was having problems getting her writing done because of distractions.

I tweeted to her and let her know that I had a free resource for my Drae Box Books email subscribers that dealt with that very topic (How to Write Your Book or Product Faster (18 Tips to Stop Sabotaging Your Writing Goals). I already had her email, so once she confirmed that she would love the resource, I emailed the PDF resource to her.

1. Actionable: Stop Doing Nothing But Retweeting

You’re not worth following if all you ever do is retweet other people’s tweets. People can easily pick through those you retweet the most from your timeline, head to their timelines and decide if they’re valuable to them and worth following.

2. Actionable: Stop Following Everyone That Follows You Just Because They Found You

The amount of time you spend on Twitter could be tallied up with how many people you follow. I suspect that the more people you follow, the less engaged you are with their tweets. You’re content-overloading yourself. When I rebooted how I use Twitter for my brand, I decided that I would only connect with entrepreneurs who are seeing MORE success than me, writers working on their first book and authors. This also means that any followers who don’t fit into these categories (or doesn’t provide a service one of these types of people would benefit from) is less likely to be picked when I’m interacting with my followers — especially as my followers grow in quantity.

Head to Manage Flitter and whittle down how many tweeters you’re following. It’s a pretty handy free resource that lets you unfollow people depending on various factors such as how quiet they are, how noisy they are, if they have a higher following than they’re following and more. That brings me onto the next actionable:

3. Actionable: Know Who You Want To Meet

I use social networks to meet:

• Other (fiction) authors
• Entrepreneurs more successful than I currently am
• Writers who are working on their first novel / pre-published authors

This helps me meet people with whom I can either learn from, or that I have a higher ability to naturally interact with. Authors and writers are also the people my web services such as wrpgs.net and author consultations focus on helping the most.