6 Lessons From Using Twitter

I've been experimenting with Twitter over the last six months (@ErikSherman) and have learned a few things:

1. Every form of social media has its own way of working. Don't assume that what you've seen work on one will necessarily work on another.


2. If you can figure out the rules for a given type of social medium (and many who pontificate over what works and what doesn't don't actually know, so far as I can tell), it might work for you. But what you want may have to come indirectly. For example, endlessly tooting your own promotional message on Twitter (or anywhere else, come to think of it) quickly gets tiring for the audience.


3. Generally, what works involves providing things of interest to an audience and some of your personality, within reason.


4. You don't have to live on Twitter to use it. Smart judicious use is much better than a torrent of mistakes.


5. If you're going to post links, do so using bit.ly or some other URL shortening service that will let you track clickthroughs. You want to try seeing what works and what doesn't.


6. Clickthroughs can be low - really low. As in 1 or 2 percent of the people
   seeing a message. However, they can at times be much higher. I recently got over 900 clickthroughs to one of my articles in a single day. That is far beyond anything I had seen before, and I don't have a huge number of people following me. I attribute it to a topic that interested many, a headline that had some life to it ("Stop the Facebook Valuation Madness!"), and adding appropriate hashtags.

If you're active and say things that people find interesting, you'll get more followers. In the last six months, I've gained 525 followers without following the "official rules." For example, I follow only a fraction back (and say so in my profile) and don't thank everyone for following when they do. Yet I think my approach of following what interests me and trying to post things that will interest others is working, because that way the messages are essentially about them, not me. And I want to develop an approach that could work should things continue to scale.