Five Tips To Improve Your Twitter Experience

1) Fill in your bio completely.  Don’t use a shortened URL for your homepage, let people see where they are going before they click.  It’s best to have a link to something, even if it’s just a photo account, or your Facebook page.  Use a real name and a real location.  You can enjoy Twitter with just a “handle” but you won’t get the same level of use and interaction from it.  Make good use of the 160 characters you are given for a bio.  Include key words that interest you so that others who share your interests will find you.  Avoid the word guru.  Guru is something other people call you, not that you call yourself.

2) Experiment with Twitter Search and the various applications available.  Twitter is fun on its web interface, but much more robust and useful viewed and used through one of the many Twitter clients available. The two top apps at the moment are Tweetdeck (My personal favorite) and the Seesmic Desktop.   Try Tweetchat.com where you can put in a single word or #Hashtag and see all tweets that include your chosen topic.  This can help sift out clutter when you are interested in a particular topic.

3)  If possible, include some photos, humor, and pizazz in your posts.  It’s great to just talk to a few people, and a lot of people on Twitter are perfectly happy with that, but the more interesting you make it, the more likely you are to expand your twitterverse.  On this same topic, avoid just posting endless strings of links to news articles, or of quotes. It’s fine to mix those in – particularly if it’s a link you really believe people will be interested in, but remember that Twitter is a conversation, and too much droning will bore even the your staunchest supporters.

4)  While you may have joined Twitter hoping to push your book, website, application, training program, or business, you’ll have a better experience if you nudge that slightly to the side and begin by engaging on a personal level.  If your posts are all along the lines of “working on some web content for my new book” followed by “hoping to find buyers for my new book” and “Click here to read an excerpt from my new book,” you’ll lose people pretty quickly.  Get them interested in you, and let the book come into the conversation more naturally.  Include links to your blog entries as you make them, but don’t put them in an endless string or “reruns” because you’ll soon seem like the blogger who called wolf, and when you DO post something new, no one will notice.

5) Be yourself.  Don’t post things because you think they will draw followers, post things because you care about them.  Don’t retweet people just because they are popular, retweet posts that you enjoy.  It takes longer to build a list of followers by conversation, careful inspection of profiles, and interaction, but the list will be useful and relevant, and if you have a goal on Twitter, it is the method mostly likely to help you achieve it.  People want to talk with you, hear about your life and your work – and they hope you’ll show an equal interest in return.  That’s what makes the wheels turn, after all.  That’s the conversation.  Be a positive part of it, and you’ll find the experience energizing and a lot of fun.