How’s Twitter doing these days?

Some thoughts on Twitter and how it affects the average WordPress blogger presently :- how to get value out of it, what to avoid and how to maintain a decent etiquette – it does seem to have grown slightly in the last year or so.

Success requires 2-way communication. “Broadcasters” – you know the ones… Their profile says 3 following 12,455 followers – they’re not being a success via Twitter, they’re trading off an established reputation.

It would be nice not to have to do the work, but if you’re starting at the bottom… you’ll have to do the work, no one else will. Follow those who follow you.

Twitter is networking, linking, creating connections, so there’s logic in not just tweeting your own content.
If someone tweets your content tweet about theirs and/or retweet them. People do respond well to being talked up – shameless, I know, but we are creatures of vanity. Giving someone a positive mention can pay a dividend. You can give them a recommendation at MrTweet and elsewhere, and there’s always #followfriday.

Note that there are 2 competing factors with retweeting someone else’s content.

1. You want to keep retweets vaguely accurate to your niche, obviously
2. But you’ll want to introduce your followers to someone/something new – they’ll think of you as authoritative, god forbid…

Try to keep a handle on what you retweet, it’s all too easy to get carried away by the urge to fill up the timeline and look busy. So careful who you recommend and retweet because it all reflects on you. Avoid the gimmicks of you follow me, I’ll follow you etc etc. looks tacky….

And do watch out for shortened urls – don’t display or retweet anything you haven’t first checked, and that definitely includes anything that arrives in a comment.

The nature of Twitter now is that nobody can read all their tweets – so a little bit of duplicate tweeting for your own content has its value. Too much and the risk is obvious, so maybe if you’re tweeting up a new blog post, mention it a couple of times on the day and then again a couple of days later, no great harm in that. Schedule – a little bit. Socialoomph, CoTweet and others have the means to schedule your priceless content.

But definitely – we’re not always as good at this as we’d like to be – make some reply to your @mentions, if they’re not completely auto-generated.

On the other hand again, it’s more difficult, and probably not efficient, to keep up with all your direct messages – far too many of these are auto-generated marketing drivel. So there’s probably no good reason to DM somebody if you want to make sensible contact – you might try tweeting an @mention as well to indicate you sent a DM…

Don’t bother to get annoyed if someone makes no response – they may be far too busy with other things, they may be grateful but not inclined to fill up their timeline with mutual congratulations, they may be a bit of a tosser. Who knows… Don’t take it personally, get on with what’s next…

And lastly – waste no time on the pointless building of followers. There are good and bad followers, but the vast majority are meaningless followers. Yes, I know there are a few things around the web that reward huge metrics, but you’re sending out a tweet that even if noticed is never going to be in the sphere of interest of the noticer – what’s the point?

My guess, and that of others, is that Twitter is starting to fight a battle with its signal-to-noise ratio, other options such as FriendFeed seem to have their advantages (for how long…?) so it is up to you to keep it relevant…