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How to become a Twitterati?
Posted: August 27th 2010
The Twitterati are famous people who twitter or people who've become famous because of Twitter. So if you belong to the last category and want Twitter to work for you, how do you do it? How do you become a Twitterati?
What is Twitter?
Twitter originally was started as a social media tool. Allowing you to post short messages of a maximum 140 characters answering the question "What are you doing?". Of course there are people who take this to heart and lifestream away. Lifestreaming is a term we use for people who tweet everything and with that I do mean EVERYTHING. This may actually work if you are a first category Twitterati for the simple fact that when someone rich and famous tweets about every day stuff it's not as normal as for us average folk. But if you have a 9 to 5 office job, for which you hardly leave your desk, tweeting everything might not be the way to go unless you have a huge sense of humor to throw into it.
Tweets (the messages send to Twitter) have actually become much more than the answer to the question "What are you doing?". You can share thoughts, interesting things you've heard, web site links, photos, music and you can use it to respond to others.
For which purpose can I use Twitter?
As with many things online it really helps to decide what it is you want a tool like Twitter to do for you. Especially when you have a career or commercially driven reason to use the Internet.
- Communicate with friends and family
How to use it: Protect your tweets to keep them private and search for your friends. Then share whatever you like. Do remember that content (text and photos) placed on other sites (like tools to post music, photos or tweets over 140 characters) might not be protected.
- Network and meet new people
How to use it: Make sure you filled out your little bio on your profile. Use an open attitude and be social. Respond to tweets by others. You can use a website called http://www.twollo.com to find more people with similar interests to yours. You can also use http://search.twitter.com/advanced to find out a little more about a person prior to following them.
- Promote yourself or a product
How to use it: Make sure you filled out your little bio on your profile and make sure there's a link there to a website with more information. Stick to the subject for the most part, but make sure you are not just a broadcaster and do not spam. Repeating the same message over and over again is not going to do it. Start competitons, share your knowledge with others or answer questions from people. It's been said that people who reply to other tweets get more followers. You too can use http://www.twollo.com to find people with interests that lock onto your product. Follow them and see if they follow you back. Use popular hashtags to draw attention to you. Retweet positive tweets about your brand as short testimonials, but don't overdo it. Keep in mind that you are trying to brand yourself or your product here. That's not the same as stroking your ego. To measure the result of your tweet you can use a http://www.tweetreach.com.
- Stay updated
You can use Twitter to get the latest on certain people or stay updated about a certain subject. There are a lot of people on Twitter who've created an account just to follow celebrities. They are called lurkers or responders. Lurkers just follow and responders post responses to what they read, but hardly send out their own tweets. So signing up to Twitter does not mean you have to post messages yourself, but while you're there why not join in on the fun?
There are also some general tips:
- Don't tweet too much and don't tweet too little. Make sure every tweet is tweetworthy
- Use humor in your tweets
- If you want to use Twitter for various purposes or to promote several things, you might want to consider setting up separate accounts. We call the second account a back channel account.
- You can send postponed tweets through http://www.tweetlater.com
- Use hashtags to make your tweets easier to find. You can start your own hashtags or use the popular ones. One of the many sites offering an overview of hastags is http://twubs.com/
- Some say it's not adviced to show off on Twitter.
- You can follow me on http://twitter.com/vpublishing (Internet business) or http://twitter.com/noratol (music)
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