Microblogging: 20 Do’s and Don’ts for Using Twitter to Build Your Blog or your Brand

Originally published at Am I the Only One Dancing?. Please leave any comments there.

It’s easy (if you have enough money to pay for it) to get a really big Twitter following.  It’s against Twitter rules, and it isn’t actually effective, but it’s easy.  It is much harder to get a Twitter following that engages with you, follows your links, and recommends you to other people. Below the fold are a whole lot of tips to help you make Twitter a place where people will want to hang out with you and follow you home to your blog or business.

Characteristics of a successful Twitter feed:

• It has an interesting profile and an informative picture or a picture of you. 140 characters is pretty concise. A catch phrase that describes you or your service well, plus several key words that identify you to potential followers, is critical to success.
• It’s active – at least a few tweets a day, up to a couple of hundred depending on your tolerance and the tolerance of your followers. Bloggers tend to have more active twitters than ‘pure’ business accounts, perhaps because their followers are more ‘hungry’ to read.
• It has an interesting mixture of links, personal comments on life or what’s going on in the world, information about the tweeter’s blog or product, and re-tells (RT), conversations, and recommendations of interesting people to follow (through Follow Friday #ff or just #follow) or interesting ‘stuff’ to check out – music, videos, books, games, etc. whatever fits with your style and your target audience.
• Is built by following interesting people and then providing them with interesting things to read. There are several ways to do this, and there is a role for services such as Twiends, but blind following leads to a totally random following who may or may not have any actual interest in what you’re writing about.
• Is often facilitated by scheduling of tweets through a bulk scheduling service, but is never solely scheduled tweets. It’s up to you whether you ‘reveal’ that you schedule tweets. Frankly, most people can tell. I schedule some, and spend some time monitoring and responding to comments and RT. I’d never get any ‘real’ writing done if I didn’t schedule (using HootSuite).
• Is a conversation. 140 characters allows for natural conversational breaks, like breaths when you’re talking in person. It’s not a medium for monologue, but for exchange of ideas. A successful twitter feed has lots of give and take in it. Make room for it.
• Pays attention to your followers. RT their tweets. Mention them to other followers. Asks them questions and answers theirs. Uses Twitter culture to make their customers feel seen and appreciated through Follow Fridays and other traditions.
• Appeals to your audience. My audience is an eclectic blend of progressives, bibliophiles, knitters, and people who are interested in geek culture, happiness and spirituality and mental health. It’s an unusual blend, but there’s more overlap than you’d think, and it appears to work for me. If, however, I suddenly started talking about curtailing women’s rights and making ‘making money’ the primary goal of life, my followers would drop like flies. That’s not what they’re into.
• Keeps it PG-13 for the most part. A pure business feed might even want to stay G rated. Some more focused blog feeds have an audience that are more tolerant of occasional F-bombs. Know your audience and cater to it.
• Has humor in it, or at least ‘good humor’. People retweet funny tweets much more often than dry, informational tweets. It’s a great way to engage and increase your following. People also retweet friendly, compassionate tweets. It pays to be nice.
• Keeps its follower and following counts roughly even in order to help others also build Twitter accounts. Twitter has a built in limitation that once you hit 2000 followed, you can only follow more if your follower/follow ratio is within certain limits. Their following rules are here. Use lists and searches to manage your feed so that you can still find the stuff you want to read.One excellent way to manage lists is through Formulists.
• Keeps it real. Behind the curtain, whether you schedule or not, whether you use Twitter for business, or not, there is a live, real, authentic human being with an interesting ‘voice’ who is monitoring the feed and interacting with the other real, authentic human beings out there.

Things you’ll never (or extremely rarely) see in a successful Twitter feed:

• A picture of an egg as a profile picture. Really. Take the time to upload a picture.
• A profile that says, essentially, ‘there’s way too much of me for this short of a space’. It’s intended to be a brag about the person’s importance or uniqueness, but what it really says is that he don’t know how to use the space he has.
• Nothing. If all you do is open the account and let it sit, you will not have any success using Twitter to build your blog or brand. Tweet at least a few times a day, every day. Even on weekends.
• ALL CAPS: PEOPLE REALLY HATE ALL CAPS BECAUSE THEY LOOK LIKE YELLING, SO THEY DON’T FOLLOW PEOPLE THAT USE THEM A LOT.
• Constant begging for followers. I have the phrase ‘follow me my best friend’ blocked on my auto-followback program so that I don’t even see the people who use it.
• Bigotry and Negativity. Racism, misogyny, homophobia, meanness and hate in general. They have no place in a business feed regardless, but even in a blogging feed, I can think of only extremely rare circumstances where this might lead to success, and only among a clientele that you’re welcome to, because I wouldn’t want it.
• On that note, be cautious about politics in general. I write (among other things) a political blog, so my Twitter feed has politics, but if that doesn’t apply to you, it’s often better to leave out politics. Politics can be divisive, and drive away paying customers.
• Unsafe or spammy links. Check your links for safety before recommending. Use WOT (Web of Trust) or another service to determine if you’re linking to a safe site. This is especially important if you are using Sponsored Tweets or another service to monetize your Twitter feed.
• A constant stream of ads, links, and out of context quotes. Some ‘botters’ will try to mix it up by posting canned ‘news’ and quotes of famous people alongside their links and ads for whatever it is they’re selling. There is a difference between this and real content, and most people can spot the difference. Ads are fine, if kept to no more than a few times a day, with plenty of real content to keep things interesting.

The bottom line is pretty simple. Know your audience, listen to them, provide good content, and don’t be annoying. There’s lots of other stuff to read out there on Twitter. If you want to be someone that people don’t want to miss, give them a reason.

Following these rules, my following got 8x larger in one month, and my Klout score went from 39 to 62 in the same month (and no end in sight for either!). More importantly (for me) my blog visits doubled or more (on all three blogs) and my income from both AdSense and Amazon Affiliate links increased as well. Nothing good is effortless. Stick with it.

And how does this relate back to happiness? This is personal, folks. If I can get enough of you thinking that my blogs are interesting to read, I can make enough money to justify writing full time and working from home. Its been my dream since I was a kid, a dream deferred because life and the demands of children demanded it.

If you, too, have a similar dream, knowing how to use the tools necessary to make it happen is an essential tool for building happiness. Good luck with it!

To Stay Connected and Spread the Merriment Please Like my Facebook Page and follow me at @odanu on Twitter.

Add to RSS and Keep Dancing! or Sign up by Email

Return to Am I the Only One Dancing? for more, or go Walking Upstream for political writing.  

small print: While I often recommend things just because I like them (I’m nice that way) please assume for FTC purposes that any endorsement is compensated — and have a truly beautiful, happy day!