So you have finally joined the world of Twitter and have been tweeting for a few days, but it feels like an echo chamber. Nobody is listening. Here are a few tips to building that niche community of followers – the holy grail of Twitter!
Set up your Twitter profile properly
Make sure you have fully completed your profile. People overlook all the basic settings and just start tweeting and the problem with that is your tweets look like they’re coming from an anonymous robot. Upload an avatar, fill in your city & country, add a small bio about yourself (max 160 characters) and if you have a blog or Facebook profile you don’t mind sharing, add that as your web site. Customise the colours of your profile if you wish, but with the new Twitter design, background and colours have taken a backseat.
Follow some basic Tweeting techniques
There really aren’t any hard fast rules about tweeting, other than be yourself! Be kind to others when possible, credit the source when retweeting an interesting link and try not to retweet multiple retweets to try and have a conversation. Skype and Google Talk are for conversations. At the end of the day, try and add value to your current and future followers. In the blogging world content is king and that same rule applies on Twitter!
Mobile Twitter
Using Twitter on your phone is probably where Twitter is used the most! If you have an iPhone, Blackberry or Android phone, there are a number of Twitter apps you can download that have all the functionality of Twitter’s website built into it. If you still living in the stone ages though, just visit m.twitter.com from your mobile browser and you’ll be tweeting in no time while away from your computer.
Photos on Twitter
Lastly, one of the best ways I have found to get people interested in you and your tweets is to upload and tweet pics from wherever you are. Obviously not boring “here is my bedroom” photos, but pics of interesting things you come across, quirky signs, sports cars, gourmet food and anything weird gets people looking and responding! To upload pics to Twitter, sign up to Twitpic, yFrog or a microblogging service like Posterous. These services all integrate with Twitter and will have you tweeting pics to your followers in no time!
So there you have it. Now go and follow me on Twitter! @JBagley
Read more posts by Jason Bagley
Related posts:
So how did you get your first followers?
Hey Clint, I started tweeting! No tweets = no followers.
Hi Jason, were you tweets determined by the followers that you wanted, or did you just tweet about everything to get any kind of follows? So what did you tweet about initally? I ask because I like to distill the process to something usable in any area.
My advice above about being yourself is exactly what I did. I tweeted my opinions on stuff, linked to cool articles / resources that I found interesting and helped others on Twitter where I felt the need to.
So naturally my tweets will be about things that interest me (read my Twitter bio!) and that is exactly why people started following me!
If I’m setting up a Twitter profile for a brand or a campaign, then naturally those tweets will be about the type of followers I’m trying to attract.
Thanks Jason.
With havin so much content do you ever run into any problems of plagorism or copyright violation? My site has a lot of completely unique content I’ve either written myself or outsourced but it looks like a lot of it is popping it up all over the internet without my agreement. Do you know any solutions to help prevent content from being ripped off? I’d certainly appreciate it.
I’ve been browsing online more than 3 hours today, yet I never found any interesting article like yours. It is pretty worth enough for me. In my view, if all web owners and bloggers made good content as you did, the internet will be much more useful than ever before.