Twitter Advice: Be Informative, Be Interesting, Be Systematic

When using twitter, it is advisable to do two things: first off, to provide a lot of valuable information that is genuinely helpful; and second, to have some personality. Twitter is very much what you would call a "viral" phenomenon. It has the potential to spread your name and message to thousands or millions of people overnight via something called a "retweet." A retweet is simply when another twitter user repeats something you have said in a Tweet while giving you proper credit.

Therefore, it goes without saying that the more useful and the more interesting your tweets, the greater the chance that they will be retweeted. But the retweeting concept works the other way as well. You would be well advised to retweet interesting posts by the people you follow. You'll find that that this greatly increases the number of times that your tweets are retweeted. You have to remember that this is a social thing. The more you give (i.e., the more often you help spread the messages of others), the more you get (the more often other people will spread your message).

In keeping with the theme of being both informative as well as interesting, I think it is a good idea to adopt some kind of online personality that is a bit more robust or controversial than you are in real life. People are going to be forming an opinion of you based on extremely small pieces of text. If those pieces of text are humorous or very interesting, they will have more impact.

So the three pieces of the puzzle are to be useful, to be interesting, and to be systematic. I haven't talked about being systematic yet but that is just as important as being interesting and useful. Twitter is literally an ocean of people. To keep your name in front of as many of those people as possible, you need to tweet often. I think this is where some kind of automated system comes in very handy. I use a software solution to automate my accounts. So even on days when I'm just too busy or distracted to worry about Twitter, my account still gets updated.

Follow the advice in this article and you'll have a much better chance at having your marketing message spread to the world via other Twitter users. This whole article can be summed up in one sentence: add value. Don't create junk. Don't waste people's time. Entertain and educate. On Twitter, the world is your audience.