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.

Picking Favorites to Improve Social Media Skills and Build Audience

Don't let the opening throw you, because while I start with a Twitter-related service, I'm going to end someplace different.

Someone I follow on Twitter mentioned a site called Twibes. On going to the site, you enter your Twitter user name. Twibes fetches your follow list (for those who don't use Twitter, the list of people whose 140-character messages you elect to receive). You click on the "10 people who you think deserve more followers." I stopped after that, because next it was going to send messages to all of them, asking to sign up in turn and put me on their lists.

Although it seems like another form of virtual mutual admiration society, in the process of trying the site, I realized something: It was pretty easy for me to choose the top ten. And as I picked the first few, I noticed the criteria I was using:

• Doesn't send out dozens of tweets, but sends out enough that I'm not surprised to see something from them.
• If mentioning something personal, is at least witty about it.
• Might provide links to material that I find particularly interesting.
• If provides links, gives enough of a description that it makes me want to read.
• Doesn't limit links to their own writing.
• Represents a person, not a company or organization.
• Shows some personality in their tweets, not lines that could come out of a text book.

That's when it hit me. By picking a list of favorite Tweeter feeds, I had to pull together the characteristics that made something appealing to me. But then, those criteria should apply to what I wrote on Twitter.

Yes, there are lists of the things you "should" do on Twitter, or Facebook, or in a blog. But forget about the often repeated didactic collections often espoused by those who are trying to promote themselves as experts in social media. Not all people have the same tastes, and you're never going to satisfy everyone. What you can do is start with understanding why some things appeal to you. When you do, you're probably on the way to knowing how to attract kindred spirits, who might enjoy your work.

You could apply this "list of ten" (or 20, or 30, but not too many) to anything else in social media. What are your top favorite blogs and why? Not the blogs that you monitor for a beat or another professional purpose, but that you actually enjoy reading? What web pages are your favorites? It's a human and genuine way to distill the qualities that you might want to emulate.

I suspect there's another level any of us could take this. Are any of your list of favorites one of the "big" names that gets many followers? (Alas, my own tastes seem to run to the relatively obscure.) If so, then you might spend a little extra time seeing what they are doing, because not only are they reaching you in an authentic way, but they're pulling in a lot of different people. That might be due to notoriety of one form, but other factors could aid in the process.

This approach won't guarantee you more traffic or attention. However, it might help you improve the aspects of your online work that tend to make people want to read and come back, and that's a foundation of building an audience

Sree Sreenivasan podcast of Twitter for journalists online discussion

For those who don't know about him, Sree Sreenivasan teaches at the Columbia School of Journalism and is highly regarded as someone who gets how to use technology well in the pursuit of journalism. He does occasional webcasts now - I just got an email about one on LinkedIn for journalists today at 3:30 to 4:30 pm Eastern (at the link and available afterward). But right now I'm listening to the archived version of the webcast on Twitter for journalists. It's got an interesting set of speakers, and it's free. One reason to catch the webcasts as they happen, though, is that you can dial in (instead of coming in over the web) and ask questions. In today's economy, who can't use a good deal?

The Problem with Social Media Campaigns

I'm about to talk about corporate marketing because there's a chance that some readers will seek financial solace in the arms of big business. One of the trends in marketing has been social media, putting together campaigns that are supposed to work on such sites as Facebook or MySpace. The concept actually isn't new and we've seen all sorts of "viral" campaigns bravely rolled out by corporations hoping to surf on the zeitgeist.

Unfortunately, if you've had the sense that many of these efforts will go nowhere, some research bears out your pessimism. A Gartner researcher said that three-quarters of the Fortune 1000 are trying to use social media, and that half of these efforts will fail:

"(Businesses) will rush to the community and try to connect, but essentially they won't have a mutual purpose, and they'll fail," Sarner said. By a "mutual purpose," he means a way to serve both the company putting out the campaign and the audience interacting with it: finding that balance is not easy. The quirkiest and most addictive campaigns often provide little value for the company and turn out to be fads, whereas marketing efforts on the Web often don't go over as well with the public.

In other words, people don't go to social media for the sake of companies. They go for their own interests. If the campaign you write doesn't take that into account, then it won't work. The campaign also must have an intelligent goal. Trying to "get people talking" isn't enough, because without action there will be no business benefit.

So you have to match the venue of the campaign, and its content, with the types of people you will find at that venue and their interests. It's really basic marketing, but easy to overlook in the rush to do trendy work. So act as a consultant, not just as a writer, and help your clients see the basic problems and be sure they are framing a campaign in a way that's likely to work. Because if it doesn't, guess who is likely to be seeing a good portion of the blame?