“Sometimes I lie awake at night, and ask, 'Where have I gone wrong?' Then a voice says to me, 'This is going to take more than one night.'” Charles M. Schulz
Love it! That quote by the creator of the "Peanuts" comic strip hits home on so many levels. The one I'm going to talk about here is trying to be a Twitter Star overnight.
I'm sure you've read the DM's (direct messages for all you twitter neophytes) touting "Get 1000's of Followers - Click Here". When you click on the senders profile you notice they have 129 followers. I guess they haven't done the "Click Here" part, yet.
Like all things good, you may have to wait a while to become Twitter Star. Unless your name is Beyonce, or Ashton, or Ellen, or Kardashian you probably aren't going to set the Twitterverse on fire overnight.
But you can practice a few things to leapfrog over the rest of us mere mortals and really put your Twitter life on steroids. I'll start with a few in this post and continue with more in upcoming posts.
The first and most important thing is to understand the rules you must play by. The first are called the Twitter Terms of Service (TOS) and you can find them here: http://twitter.com/tos?PHPSESSID=debec4ce1124da18c632a97423a6fa5e
Next, you need to learn about Twitter Jail and how important it is to stay out of it. Believe me, as someone who has been there...more than once...you don't want to wind up there. My friend Dr. Udi Schlessinger has written some great posts on the subject and that brings me to the next point.
Read some blogs from people who are succeeding at what you want to do...excel in the Twitterverse. Udi is one such person and his blog is here: http://www.industryreview.org/
The post I mentioned earlier on Twitter Jail can be found here: http://www.industryreview.org/social-media/twitter-jail-a-mystery-wrapped-in-an-enigma
A must visit for the best blogs about Social Media, Twitter, Facebook and getting followers is http://www.followers.biz . This is one of the most comprehensive and user-friendly sites I've found and although it is currently being revamped, it hosts a wealth of information and is a definite Bookmark worthy site.
It was created by my friend and a guy who understands Social Media Marketing, Larry Wentz. If you wonder whether Larry knows what he's doing, visit http://twitter.com/LarryWentz and see for yourself.
In my next post I'll give some more essential blogs to follow and creative steps to be the Twitter Star you always knew you were. Until then, Tweet Night!
Keep Believing...
Posts
Bille,
ReplyDeleteI love the idea of finding others are are doing it well and learning from and modeling them!
Of course Udi & Larry are brilliant at what they do. Udi's blog is one of the best, most detailed resources available today and I'm glad you added a link to it.
Thanks for your useful post!
Felicia Slattery
Billie,
ReplyDeleteExcellent post on those getting started with Twitter. I think an important thought for people just starting out is it isn't just about the number. Due to the simplicity of Twitter people open an account and many think they should have thousands of followers right away. When starting out need to focus on quality of Tweets, building the conversations and relationships, and then focus on increasing the number. I do agree that Dr. Schlesinger does provide and excellent resource on this topic with his blog.
Rob
Hey Bille,
ReplyDeleteThanks for the kind words!
I'm always amused by the so-called "Twitter experts" (not even "social media experts"!) who have very few followers and sometimes have large factual errors in what they say (i.e. I recently read one declaring that you can "only follow up to 50 people a day". So wrong it's comical).
Even though Twitter is not a very complicated application, it has a lot of nuances, and the potential interaction with many people results in unexpectable - at least until you experience this - results. I.e. who will follow you and why? What would they expect?
Understanding some of these things comes with time, and personally I think this is a fascinating study in its own right (based on more than several visits from university sites to my blog, I'm guessing a few are actually taking place).
Felicia and Rob - thank you very much for your compliments - you guys rock!