7 Tips for Making the Most of Twitter

There are a number of good uses for Twitter. Twitter works well with traditional blogging platforms to give you increased readership for your blog. Twitter can be effective in generating buzz for a product or service. Journalists have been using Twitter to enhance their news reporting ability. Others use Twitter as a customer service tool.

But no matter how you personally utilize the popular microblogging site, there are some tips that will help you get the most out of the service. Here are 7 tips to good Twitter netiquette.

1. Focus on Quality, not Quantity.
My colleague, Sara Paxton of Evans Media Group, is a Twitter maven. She stresses "forgetting about the number of followers," and instead focusing on the type of followers. We've seen Twitter accounts go bad by employing the many "get lots of Twitter followers fast" schemes tha have sprung up.

2. Engagement Level Is More Important than Follower Count.
Having a ton of followers is great, but if none of them cares enough about what you're tweeting to comment or conversate, then it's pretty much pointless. As we wrote in a previous blog post, you must have engagement to have client relations, marketing potential, or sales.

3. Publish Quality Content
As with almost all things marketing, content is king. If you just publish sales spam or garbage content, you won't get much engagement on Twitter. Quality content means content that is desirable to your followers.

4. Don't Spam DMs
Direct messages (DMs) are a nice feature of Twitter. But be careful not to overdo them. Many Tweeps use the DM feature to send unsolicited emails full of spam. This is a surefire way to lose followers and harm your reputation.

5. Be Careful With the Number of Apps You Give Account Access to
The number of Twitter apps out on the market now is staggering. Many of these apps require you to give them access to your Twitter status feed. This is so they can send tweets to your feed without your permission. Other apps use this access to auto-follow other users. Be wary of this, as too many apps having access can quickly corrupt your Twitter feed or even cause your account to be suspended.

6. Use the List Feature to Produce A More Useful Twitter Experience
With Twitter, you can create lists which include certain Twitter users. However, you can also use lists to segment and categorize Tweets. For example, on one of our client Twitter feeds, we have created various lists of useful information for the client's followers, including local weather updates, frequently asked questions, customer comments, and the like. This adds value to our Twitter account which increases our following.

7. Foster Two-Way Conversation.
A lot of people use Twitter only to peddle their message. They don't really care to get to know their followers or what they're followers are interested in - or to comment on their followers' tweets. In our experience this is bad form, and quickly leads to a stagnating Twitter feed with little or no engagement. A better practice, we've found, is to simply engage in normal conversation as opposed to bombarding people with your message.

If you follow these guidelines, your Twitter experience will be better for both yourself and your followers. You'll start to build trust and a good reputation. Your Tweets will be retweeted more often, and you'll find that, whatever your objective for using Twitter, you will be better able to fulfill those objectives.