TwitNine

Social media guru, Chris Brogan, created a really good list of 50 Twitter Power Tips. For those of you who prefer audio-visual media, as opposed to print, the list has since been turned into a video, which you can watch: here.

At Twitnine, we think that sometimes the best tips are the most obvious ones:

• A lot of @replies shows a lot of humanity/engagement. – In other words, give back to your followers. Don’t just plug your site or product. Make Twitter a two-way communication tool.
• Everyone does it their own way. You’re doing it wrong, too – to someone. – Tips and tricks can be useful and are a great way to help us learn. But it’s good practice to come up with your own ideas and methods. Do what works for you!
• A non-standard background and face avatar means we believe you may be human. – Never underestimate the power of a well filled-out bio and avatar!!!
• Spamming us repeatedly is okay. We just unfollow you. – Every tweet should offer something to your followers – whether you are expressing an opinion or asking a question. Make every tweet valuable!
• Start thinking in 120 characters (remember? save 20). Every bit of this advice is tweetable. – At first, it is difficult to limit yourself, but aim to deliver concise information to your followers. Remember: Quality over Quantity!

All of these tips are great. They are really useful tips for any new tweeters out there and also act as great reminders for the seasoned Twitter user.

I think it’s important to always remember that whether you’re using Twitter to try to sell a product or promote a website, Twitter is first and foremost a social media platform. You can plug your site or product to your heart’s content, but do not forget Twitter’s primary purpose – do not forget to network with your followers.

Somehow, social networking has turned into a “who-can-have-the-most-friends” contest. It started with MySpace. Some users would see someone with 15,000 followers and somehow feel that their 200 followers was completely worthless.

These sites, that were set up as social networking sites, suddenly became a popularity contest. The actual “networking” part has somehow got lost along the way.

Don't follow people like this!

Twitter gurus make the observation that the number of followers you have on Twitter correlates with the quality and value of information that you’re putting out there. For example, if you’re following 1,000 people and somehow 800 of those people follow you back, then it doesn’t really mean anything. But, if 800 people started following you of their own accord, while you are only following 100 people that you are interested in, then it shows that people are interested in you. People are following you because of what you have to offer – not because you followed them first.

I think the golden rule of successful Twitter networking is this: Only follow people who you find interesting and valuable – follow them if you would talk to them in real life.

You do not have to follow everyone that you come across!

Follow these guidelines before you click the “follow” button:

1. Don’t follow out of sympathy. “Poor guy, has no description, no website, 4 tweets and is following 2,000 people. I’ll follow him back”. NO. Following someone because they followed you is very silly – especially if it’s someone with no picture, description, etc. I mean, seriously, what on earth has this person got to offer you? Look back to the golden rule: Only follow people back if you find them interesting.

2. I would pay you for updates. Sometimes it’s good to consider whether or not you would pay to follow a person before you click the follow button. Would you pay $0.25 for their tweets? If so, then sure, go ahead and follow them. If you are following 10,000 people, then that’s $2,500. Somehow I doubt that you would be willing to fork out that amount of money to sort through people’s Tweets.

3. Twitter spring cleaning. Sometimes it’s good to go through our contact lists and do a quick cull to remove the riff-raff. The first thing to do is turn off auto-follow. Then use Twitter Karma to clean up your contact list. This tool shows who you follow who is following you back. This is a great way to delete people that you followed hoping that they would follow you back – who never did. Twitoria is also a great tool as it shows you which of your contacts are inactive.

The moral of the story is to follow people who you would actually want to talk to in the real world. This way, you can use Twitter to really engage with your followers and learn about the people who you follow and who are following you. It’s one of the best ways to raise your quality and value on Twitter and to bring your own personality to the online world.

Tweeting isn’t just an opportunity to share experiences and advertise products and services; it is also a means to express political opinions and persuade others to adopt causes. Among the early adopters of Twitter were several politicians, most notably Barack Obama and John Edwards.

In two presidential bids, Edwards proved to be a  leader  in Web 2.0 politicking. His staff arguably made the best use of Twitter on the campaign trail, with regular updates  about his whistle stops and speeches. Although Obama was more successful both on-line and offline, Edwards created his account four months earlier, posting 87 times and picking up almost 9,000 followers before his concession and the subsequent scandal dropped his count to 6,000. At the time of his election, Obama was managing a mutual network of over 120,000 followers, the largest following in Twitter.

At the start of the election season in 2008, 7 sitting U.S. senators and 32 congressional representatives had active Twitter accounts.# By  the  time President Barack Obama addressed the joint Congress for the first time in February 2009, members of Congress were tweeting during his speech. The presidential debates sparked a lot of involvement by Twitter members as the Twitter website added a special Election stream, filtered to include tweets mentioning the candidates, the campaign, or debates. Current.TV included some of those tweets as part of its live video feed, and Twitter Vote Report
(http://blog.twittervotereport.com/) used SMS and Twitter to keep track of voter expe-riences on Election Day. Government participation isn’t limited to the U.S., either: the British Prime Minister and several Canadian politicians also make use of this medium to communicate with constituent.

There are other examples of social activism. Live Earth, a 24-hour, 7-continent concert in 2007 to benefit the SOS environmental project, used Twitter to promote its music event across several sites. Each venue showcased the latest energy-efficiency practices and was designed to minimize the environmental impact of the concert. The Sunlight Foundation, whose goal is to create a more transparent Congress, organized a Twitter petition to oppose restrictions preventing elected officials from tweeting in session. They now have their own suite of APIs (http://sunlightlabs.com/appsforamerica/) and are encouraging developers to help make government more transparent.

In February 2009, Guardian writer Paul Smith (@twitchhiker) announced that he planned to “travel by Twitter” in a stunt intending to raise money for charity: water (http://www.charitywater.org), a project to improve worldwide access to safe, clean drinking water. (This charity was also a main beneficiary of Twestival [http://twestival.com], a global tweetup on February 12, 2009 when twitterers from 202 cities met to raise money more than $250,000 and awareness for the cause.) Smith’s plan was to start in his hometown of Newcastle upon Tyne in the U.K. and attempt to travel halfway around the world in one month, to an island off the coast of New Zealand. His self imposed rules included relying only on people who followed his @twitchhiker account and offered travel and lodging through public replies. Smith documented the experience   on his blog (http://twitchhiker.wordpress.com) as well as through Twitter.

Whether you do it via Twitter or an old-fashioned Rolodex, your business, personal, and career success depends heavily on a little thing called your network. If you’re looking for ways to network more effectively or you want to find interesting, valuable people efficiently Twitter can help you build up a genuinely interesting, astonishingly relevant, and powerful network.

Entire new horizons of opportunity can open up when you finally connect with the people that are right for you. Building a network comes naturally on Twitter. The platform makes it easy to interact and connect with people and businesses who share your interests and goals, and because of @replies and other links between Twitter networks and Twitter users, to randomly interact with and discover interesting new people along the way.

The more you interact on Twitter, the more your network increases. You can build almost any specific type of network on Twitter, too. Twitter offers access to all levels of people and businesses, from those seeking work or a better social life to CEOs and national politicians.

One of the most interesting phenomena on Twitter is the communication and collaboration that can occur while businesses network with one another in public. Twitter offers a level of transparency that erases normal boundaries and rivalries. Take, for example, the CEOs of competing companies IntenseDebate (http://intensedebate.com; @IntenseDebate) and DISQUS (http://disqus.com; @disqus), two companies that build comment management software for blogs. Through a debate in Twitter, they collaborated on some cross-functional features in their otherwise rival products to make both companies’ customers happy and solve a problem.

Twitter can also help business networking in the employment sector  it’s a fantastic way to meet and evaluate new employees, and also to find new work. This movement towards a “Hire 2.0” culture (applying so-called Web 2.0 technologies to the job market), creates a more open and flexible hiring environment for all kinds of companies. You can observe potential employees while they talk about what they know, get referrals from people who know them, the friends of friends who are more likely to know about job opportunities and job candidates.

Freelancers who network and collaborate on projects can use Twitter to find former colleagues from past companies with whom they lost touch, and to get to know their existing employees and customers. We really can’t overstate how versatile a networking tool Twitter can be. In so many ways, Twitter acts as a portable business networking event that you can pop into when the time and availability suit you. Bonus: You don’t have to talk to anyone whom you don’t want to.

Big name companies, such as Comcast and Dell, use Twitter as part of an overall strategy to reinvent their reputations for poor customer service and turn things around for their brands.
How did they do it? Or, more importantly, how can you do it? Both companies set up Twitter accounts (@ComcastCares and all the Dell accounts listed at http://dell.com/twitter) as hubs for public customer-service responses. They got in the trenches of social media through Twitter and
engaged their customer bases by facing criticisms and complaints head-on, and by showing a desire to help and respond quickly without making excuses or shifting blame. Better yet, Twitter users around the world can witness this transformation and watch the companies respond to others’ complaints, improving the company image for even more people.

By listening diligently for mentions of their companies and quickly extending a helping hand, Comcast and Dell have generated substantial goodwill (not to mention, press coverage). Even when the products and services sold under those brands elicit unpleasant reactions from the public, having a real person reach out to help in a public forum can do a lot to prevent or dissipate consumer anger. Used artfully, one-to-one contact via Twitter instills a sense of hope that the people behind the company walls aren’t leaving customers hanging. Presence and timely response on Twitter can make the difference between a firestorm of complaints and a quickly-managed situation.

Here’s the caveat: No one has yet figured out whether Twitter-based customer service will still be such a great shortcut once Twitter grows even bigger and more popular. If the company’s customer service system has fundamental problems, remaining in closer contact with consumers alone will not fix that. Customer service on Twitter allows businesses to catch consumers in their moments of frustration and help them right away. But Twitter alone can’t fix back-end customer-service infrastructure problems such as overloaded call centers or poorly trained representatives who have no real power to help.

You don’t need to be a huge company (and you certainly don’t need to be suffering from a        bad reputation) to create an effective business presence on Twitter. Twitter provides a great customer-service channel for small and medium-sized businesses, too. If you’re at a small company, Twitter can broaden your ability to reach out widely and listen carefully at almost    no expense (only some time and possibly tools) while saving you the cost of having an entire customer-service department.

Having a Twitter account for your business can make your business more accessible, not to mention let you help people in real time who have real problems and see instant improvement in how consumers perceive your business.

You can use Twitter as a fantastic public-relations channel, whatever kind of business you work for. It offers global reach, endless connections, networking opportunities, a promotion platform, and immediate event planning and feedback. Best of all, if you float your ideas out there in genuine, valid, and interesting ways, others can pick them up and spread them around. Many Twitterers from individuals to large corporations   report scoring numerous press opportunities as a result of engaging other Twitterers and sharing on the Twitter platform.

Some traditional public relations firms may be intimidated by Twitter’s potential to connect stories, sources, and journalists. Many of them don’t yet see the opportunity, or they’re thinking about it too narrowly. Twitter is just one more tool  albeit a powerful and efficient one  to add to your arsenal if public relations is important to your business. Twitter simply gives you a
way to make what you do more accessible to people who might otherwise not hear your message.

You may have heard about Twitter in the first place in the context of a mainstream news story about an event of global importance that was first reported via citizen journalism on Twitter  such as the emergency landing of a commercial airplane in the Hudson River in January 2009. Indeed, Twitter is an exceedingly powerful tool for detecting breaking events. You don’t
always get in-depth analysis (at least, not until links to longer writings about the story begin to spread), but you do frequently find yourself way ahead of the game when a story breaks if you’re on Twitter.

Journalists and PR practitioners are among some of Twitter’s most avid users, and they do some pretty interesting things with it. On Monday nights, professionals from both sides of the field gather to talk about current stories, their professions, and the future of media, all by simply tagging their tweets with the word #journchat. Because #journchat is an agreed-on tag and a longstanding event, people know to point their search tools (or http://search.twitter.com) at that word and watch the conversation scroll by.

It was Twitter innovator @PRSarahEvans who came up with the idea for #journchat, and the community she built catapulted her from obscure community college PR practitioner to an extremely well-known social-media innovator. John A. Byrne (@JohnAByrne) of BusinessWeek implemented a similar standing event (Wednesday nights, for those of you playing along at home) when he went onto Twitter one night to answer questions and encouraged the use of the #editorchat hashtag.

Keep it real! The be-genuine Twitter rule applies at all times, even when you’re embarking on a publicity campaign (often especially when you’re attempting to drive sales or awareness to your product, service, or site). Twitter’s users can be very turned off by empty marketing banter.

Remember your balance. Just because you want to see fast results doesn’t mean that you should bombard your Twitter followers with link spam (numerous tweets that contain links to your business) or constant  about whatever you’re trying to promote. Remember to space
it out. On Twitter, overly aggressive promotions can slow your progress and reduce your audience. Tread with respect.

Give your idea wings. Come up with a pithy or witty statement about your promotion that inspires people in your network to share and pass it along (to retweet the statement, or RT) to their own networks. Getting your message retweeted is much more effective than hammering your point home on your own.

Businesses can use Twitter to talk to their customers and potential customers, and generally increase brand recognition. Given that Twitter has so many potential uses that are so diverse, how can you get started?

You can probably guess that your profile is your business’s face on Twitter. Even though many people use Twitter through a service on their phone or desktop, rather than through the Web page itself, assume that most everyone will at least look at your Profile page  if not the Web URL that you provide within that profile  before deciding whether or not to follow what you’re
doing on Twitter.

Dress nicely on Twitter: Fill out the whole Profile page when you set up your business’s Twitter account and upload an avatar (in some cases, your company logo is appropriate, but in others an individual photo is better). Link back to your main Web site, and in turn, link to your Twitter account from your Web site. You need to verify that the business account is actually yours and promote the availability of the Twitter stream to all your customers. With a widget on your site, you can even tweet to your customers (keeping freshly updated content front and center) without them having ever even heard of Twitter.

Make sure that the Twitter Bio section, short though it may be, tells Twitter users about your business. Also, the content of your business’s tweets needs to honestly, transparently show what you’re doing on Twitter. Introduce the people behind your business’s Twitter account they’re the people your Twitter readers and connections actually talk to, so let the individuals behind
the keyboard shine through.

Listen. Pay attention to what’s going on around you on Twitter. Twitter users have fascinating things to say about pretty much everything, but more importantly for you, they may already be talking about you and your business. You’re going to want to find as many ways as you can to tune in. From using Twitter Search to sophisticated social-media listening tools,  you can get useful information from Twitter in many ways. If you think of Twitter as a giant consumer sentiment engine, you can start to understand its potential. You can learn a lot by listening.

Balance. For the average business Twitter account, you need to have a good ratio of personal (or conversational) tweets to business (or promotional) ones. This ratio depends, in part, on how much you interact on Twitter and what you hope to accomplish  not to mention the nature of your business and your target audience or customer base. You may want to come up with an approximate numerical ratio that accomplishes your balance goals. You might want to decide, for example, that you can make only one or two of every ten tweets personal. Alternately, you can opt to put a particularly personal or original slant on promotional tweets, making them notably funny, valuable, or interesting to your readers. If you have a more conversational Twitter account that you still want to connect to your professional life, make about half your tweets personal, fun, or off-topic, and the other half about your business.

If you prefer to deliver business value all the time, set up your account to curate and cultivate links about events, essays, news, and ideas that are relevant to your field, in addition to promotional tweets so that you can still push your brand (without making that the only thing you do). Whatever you do, be useful. Offer value. You want to keep people engaged, which is what Twitter is all about.

How do you credit a source on Twitter or assure people that the news you tweet is accurate? As much as possible, offer proof that your news is valid.
Here’s how:

Include a link. The most basic thing you can do is link to a reliable source or, if you can’t verify, post the item as a question, asking others to share verification. The BBC learned this lesson the hard way when they posted an unverified rumor during the November 2008 Mumbai
attacks. Their page said Twitter was the source but did not link to a tweet that would support or deny its validity. Once BBC had reportedthe rumor, subsequent tweets linked to the BBC page, and the rumor persisted, where most Twitter rumors tend to die out.

Create a companion blog. In this blog, you have more space to credit the sources of your news. Link to that blog in your tweets. Make sure to go into your blog after you send your tweets and credit each story wherever possible.

Build a network based on trust and continued reliable information. Not only should you make sure that the people you follow and associate with are trustworthy, but you should also be certain that the people in your network feel the same about you.

Don’t underestimate the power of the retweet. The retweet (where one your followers repeats your tweet for the benefit of her own followers) is critical to networking and viral spread. Retweets of your posts give them a level of validity because retweets prove what you say is worth repeating. Most third-party Twitter clients have built-in buttons next to each tweet in your stream that let you easily set them up for a retweet, and we suspect Twitter will add this feature soon.

If you retweet, try to credit the original poster. Sometimes when retweeting, the 140-character limit means that you have to take out names or letters to make the message fit. Always make sure that you leave the name of the twitterer you are retweeting to acknowledge your source.

Twitter, like user-created encyclopedia Wikipedia, seems to be very good at self-policing. When a fraud starts making the rounds on Twitter, sharp-eyed users are quick to catch onto it and are just as quick in telling their friends and colleagues what’s going on. Twitter users offer a kind of natural checksand- balances system for the twitterverse.

A January 2009 news event that highlighted Twitter’s potential for citizens to act as journalists was the emergency landing of a plane in the Hudson River in New York City after a run-in with migrating birds led to the loss of both engines. Twitter users were arguably the first people to hear about it because eyewitnesses posted instant reactions.

Janis Krums, @jkrums, a Twitter user on board a ferry that raced in to rescue passengers, took an incredible iPhone picture of the floating plane and the passengers being evacuated. He instantly posted it to Twitter (http://twitter.com/jkrums/status/1121915133) using a third-party service, which hosts photos and tweets a link to them on the user’s Twitter account.
The astonishing photo was retweeted and passed around Twitter so quickly that it hit international media outlets within minutes . The Web traffic going to the photo was so overwhelming that TwitPic’s servers temporarily went offline.

Citizen journalists can do more than just observe  Twitter’s immediacy and portability (because of its availability on mobile devices) makes it possible for people to report during the moment, not just afterwards. During the November 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, Twitter was used to pass word of a blood drive to help victims.

As a part of the citizen-journalism movement, Twitter is helping make the world safer for children. Recently, the number of Twitter-generated #AmberAlerts has risen, and several children have been reunited with their families because of the observations of regular people who cared and paid attention.

Help Find My Child and other similar organizations have also been working on finding lost children through Twitter. Unlike the unofficial #AmberAlerts, which don’t come from a centralized source, @helpfindmychild is an organized international effort coordinated through one office to use Twitter to find missing children.

Twitter and other forms of citizen journalism are changing the world for the better, but users need to fact-check, credit the proper sources, and flag those twitterers who are inaccurate or worse, deliberately misleading. While Twitter and the rise of the citizen journalist both augment and replace mainstream news, you must be vigilant and ensure that the news you’re spreading
is true.

On May 25, 2008, my wife and I let our two boys stay up late to watch the Phoenix probe land on Mars (televised live on the Science Channel). I remember watching the Space Shuttle Columbia land in the early 1980s I even took a Polaroid photo of the image on our black-and-white television as it came back to earth, to capture the
moment and I hoped that my sons would remember this in the same way. It probably didn’t take, but NASA gave the mission a permanent record of the approach using a Twitter account written in the “voice” of the probe.

The Phoenix tweeted  in the first person throughout the event,  including an exciting flurry of posts as the probe approached the designated landing site (“parachute must open next. my signal still getting to Earth which is AWESOME!”). It gave the project personality and attracted over 36,000 followers. NASA used Twitter to break the news that ice had been discovered on Mars, earning one of three Twittie awards for its con-tribution to the public stream.

Mars Phoenix ended its mission in late 2008, but mission support continues to use the @MarsPhoenix account and leverage the community that formed around the probe. Other NASA Twitter accounts include those for the Mars Rovers, International Space Station, and some shuttle missions.

In February 2009, CNN reported about a Detroit doctor who used Twitter during an operation. Dr. Craig Rogers, the lead surgeon at Henry Ford Hospital, wanted people to know that a tumor can be removed from an organ while leaving the organ intact. As Rogers operated, chief resident Dr. Raj Laungani manned the Twitter timeline. This was the second such in-surgery coverage; Robert Hendrick of  https://www.change healthcare.com had  tweeted his own  surgery  four months  earlier while under  local anesthesia.