How to Succeed on Twitter – The Personal Common Sense Approach

Hana Social Flower in Maui

After the big interest shown on last week’s post about new Twitter followers…
(Read the article Twitter Followers – Why it’s Harder to Get Them Now here) I decided to write a follow up. In this follow up article I’ll to teach you what I do in order to have success on Twitter. You can do things your own way. It’s not like you have to do things exactly like I do. At the very least however, I know these tips have worked for me in an excellent way. Keep in mind, you should go for quality, not quantity.

1.  Be 3-dimensional. Some people tend to be focus solely on writing new tweets, others seem to focus on conversation and yet others spend their entire time searching keywords in order to follow other people hoping for a follow back. It’s important that you be 3-dimensional in that you find a perfect balance between writing good content, engaging with other people and searching to expand your connections. It’s like a 3 legged stool. If you take out one of the legs you’re going to fall over.  No exceptions.

Don’t spend your time selling on Twitter. People don’t want to buy your **** anyway!

2.  Use proper grammar. People, this is a writing and reading tool. Do you think people are going to want to read your tweets if they have a hard time figuring out what the heck it is you are trying to say? Worst, once they see you’re a sloppy writer they will most likely never come back. Even if you learn to finally write properly it will be very hard to get some of those people interested in you again. So, get this right the first time around. It’s not about writing like an English major. It’s about writing clearly and composing your ideas properly as to engage readers. One good thing about the short length of tweets is that it really puts people to the test on composing interesting content in short bursts. Another thing…. Proofread. Yes, proofread! While every once in a while I’ll overlook mistakes, most of the time I catch them before I post them. If you don’t proofread what you write you are just going to sound stupid more often than not (or at the very least, careless).

3.  Read tweets. I briefly touched on this in point 1, but I must mention it again. Unless you are Ashton Kutcher or Oprah, you won’t develop any lasting connection on Twitter if you don’t interact with others. And guess what? Event the celebrities engage with their fans from time to time. If even the famous types take the time to talk to their fellow twitterers, what makes you think you are going to get away with being a self-centered jerk? Take the time to skim through the new tweets in your timeline. You’re bound to run into something that catches your eye. If you found something you liked, hit the person back. If you do this a little every day, you will be surprised at how many people you are actually connecting with. You don’t have to speak with a person every single day in order to make it count. Sometimes I speak with some people once a week, or once a month. But, I’ve taken my time to connect with that person. He or she knows I’m available to talk or help whenever.

4.  Don’t post junk. No, seriously. While a joking tweet about your lunch and one about you washing the car comes across well once in a while, talking crap about mundane things is just that; mundane. Everybody watches TV, everybody eats, everybody showers (hopefully), nobody wants to read about you doing it. If you are a bit racy and tweet about your sexual encounters that’s up to you, at the very least it’ll hold an audience. But crap about your TV watching afternoon won’t.

5.  Diversify. That’s another good thing about Twitter. You don’t have to stick to only one topic. Most people reading your tweets have more than one interest. You might not hit everyone’s sweet spot with every single tweet, but you might be able to at least tickle more than one. Plus, writing about different topics increases the amount of people that might be interested in what you have to say. While this might be a screw-up for a blog, website, magazine or company, it might be just fine for micro-blogging on Twitter.

6. Update your bio. I don’t think anybody is capable of completely defining themselves in 140 characters. I know a lot of people never change their bio but I believe it helps show off your multiple interests and talents if you change your bio once in a while. Not only that, but little keyword changes here and there every once in a while can help those doing automatic searches find you. This is not completely necessary but it seems to work well for me.

7.  Be prompt. In other words, reply to DMs and Mentions in a timely manner.  Topics on Twitter move fast and they get old very quick. More often than not, if you wait an entire day to reply to a tweet the person won’t even remember what the heck you are talking about. So, if you want to succeed on Twitter, make it a habit to reply sooner instead of later. If you don’t want to be a slave to the updates, set 2 or 3 times during the day to be reminded to check for mentions or DMs and reply to them right away. You will engage your followers and the people you follow better if you do this. Most will really appreciate the prompt replies too.

8. Review your intent. What’s your intent when tweeting? I originally joined Twitter just to “try it out” but I quickly saw the possibilities and immediately got hooked. However, even though I now use Twitter for both personal and business use, I make sure to keep the personal relationships as the top priority. Don’t spend your time selling on Twitter. People don’t want to buy your **** anyway! Instead, put sincere effort in connecting with people and having meaningful conversations about stuff other than business. Not only is it more gratifying that selling **** all the time, but people are not into simply buying stuff anyway. They prefer connecting with people and the people behind the brands. The money will come later if what you have to sell is actually any good.

Well, that’s it. This is what I do for Twitter success. Hopefully you can implement some of it for your own tweeting well-being. Share this article with friends. Not to brag, but a lot of this is common sense and if the vast majority of users would implement this, Twitter would be an even better place. Have at it! -DC

Click here to follow me @sixstringsensei and post your comments via Twitter.

By Danny Cruz

Danny Cruz is a resourceful creative designer, publisher and lover of the ocean and water sports. He's also a musician and overall cool guy. Follow @sixstringsensei.

1 comment

Comments are closed.