Sorry, Twitter engenders lots of word play!
And it's public, so the conversations have Rapid Ripple Effects that can boost your popularity and your business.
Want to join the mix? The name of the game with Twitter is to follow others and have them follow you. And it works a lot like it would at a party, but some folks have a hard time getting that, so here are a few tips IMHO.
I. How to Get My Follow
1. Be a friend of a friend of mine
2. Be somebody famous who I'm interested in
3. Say something interesting about something I'm curious about
4. Be an interesting blogger who I want more connection with
5. Be a coach (I follow lots of coaches)
Getting a lot of follows is great, but it takes much more to keep those follows and if there are winners and losers with Twitter, then the winners are those who not only attract follows, but keep them.
There are a lot of Twitterers that I scan, only a few that I really pay attention to - and fewer still that I follow on my iPhone with "device updates". Those are the ones that make it onto the coveted SMS platform that makes Twitter so valuable.
II. How to Keep My Follow
1. Post daily, but not constantly,
2. Have something to say ("Woo Hoo" doesn't count)
3. Share a great resource (Use tinyurl or similar service to shorten the URL) 4. Retweet (RT) great stuff that somebody you follow has posted (Your followers may not have seen it)
5. Quote something interesting from the day's news (Or just share a great quote)
6. Be funny
7. Don't fill my homepage with "Thanks for the follow" messages to other people
8. Avoid long text conversations on Twitter (The rest of us aren't really that interested)
9. Help me solve a problem
10. Direct me to a great site
Well that's 10. Probably there are more. You'll discover them once you get going on Twitter, yourself. The easiest way to start is to have someone on Twitter invite you to follow them, so here's my invitation:
Go to http://twitter.com/MasteryCoach and click on "Follow". Fill out your profile and follow some of my friends. Pretty soon, folks will follow you, too and you'll be part of the party.
III. How to send "Device Updates" to my iPhone
1. Become my Best Friend Tweep (BFT)
There you have it!
Copyright, Julia Stewart, 2008
All rights reserved.