Are you on Twitter yet? If you’re promoting yourself or your business it should be one of your first or second social media stops after Facebook (the one must-have outpost in social media). Twitter offers a couple of great advantages over some of the other social media spaces, principal among them:
1. Forced Brevity – Your posts can’t be longer than 140 characters (actually 120 is best to make them shareable) And while it certainly is true that writing shorter is often harder than writing longer (“If I had had more time I would have written a shorter letter,” etc.), there is something almost freeing in having to keep it brief.
2. Find Your Unseen Fans – While many social media platforms require you to have an existing relationship with your network for your posts to be seen or pay to advertise to new potential fans (Facebook, for example), Twitter makes it easy to get yourself in front of people with similar interests who don’t know you, and conversely for those people to also find you. Hashtags, a keyword-like, information-organizing Twitter invention that worked so well it’s now becoming popular spreading on other platforms, makes it easy to join an existing discussion community, say, #rowing, or to create one around a particular interest.
Ready to get started, or just need the general overview? Here’s a great Twitter beginner how-to.
Once you have the basics under your belt – and if you find you’re getting good results from the platform – check out Mashable’s list of 14 Twitter tips and tricks for power users. My favorites:
– Favorite useful and relevant tweets, both to put the content in a safe place where you can get to it, and also as way to potentially get their authors to follow you back
– Tailor suggestions based on Web browsing, let your browsing history help Twitter find users and tweets you’re more likely to find
– Create user widgets, to put your Twitter feed on your website. It’s a great way to keep your site content fresh, and add new followers.
Are you on Twitter? Share your twittername and a brief description of who you are in the comments, maybe you’ll pick up a follower or three.