I am very action oriented which means I leap into things with great gusto and enthusiasm. I also learn quickly which usually means that three days after I make the leap, I figure out a better way to do it and wish I had not leapt in so quickly or deeply. I recently have begun getting active in Twitter and I have learned several things from the experience that I would like to share with other people who are pondering getting started on Twitter.
Figure Out What You Want to Achieve in Twitter First: Before you do anything on Twitter, go within and ask yourself: What do you wish to achieve on Twitter and why? Get as clear as possible. For example, I want to accomplish two things. I want to connect with people like me on Twitter and I also want to introduce my healing work to a wider audience.
Choose the First 2,000 People You Follow Wisely: Twitter lets you follow the first 2,000 without any constraints, but after that you can only follow ten percent more people than are following you. So if you want to build a large list, the people you choose to follow at the beginning are critical. Try to choose people who resonate with who you are, are open to following you back (have very balanced follower to followee ratios), and have tweeted within the last month (LOTS of people on Twitter join and then drop off). A lot of people who will end up following you are people in Social Media and Marketing who want to build a big list but who may not resonate so much with what you do so you need to try early on to build up as good a base of followers in Twitter as you can. A lot of subject matter experts in your field may not follow people back so to get around this, you can create a Twitter list for your field (I created a list for healers, spiritual growth, business, creative, etc.) and add these experts into your list so you can follow their tweets in one place. Or you can use Listorious.com (see below) to find a list of people in your field that you can follow.
Encourage Your Existing Customers and Email List People to Join You in Twitter: I hope to be able to use Twitter to deepen my connection with people who resonate with me energetically. As a practical matter, this means encouraging people on my email list to follow me on Twitter. This will be an interesting challenge because most of them probably do not have a Twitter account or are inactive on Twitter. So I will have to create some great content for release on Twitter to tempt them to signup. I love to create stuff so I am not too worried.
Focus on the Quality of People that You Follow in Twitter: There is a lot of debate in Twitter about whether you should automatically follow people who follow you. I initially auto followed people who followed me because it felt like the right thing to do. Later on as I became more Twitter savvy and looked at who I was following, I realized a lot of them were probably spammers who I do not want to encourage. Spammers love people who automatically follow. So I stopped automatically following back and now I am looking at the people who follow me and if they look like they are a real individual or company I follow them and if they look dubious I do not. It takes more time but I hope this will increase the quality of my base in Twitter. Spammers often use the default egg profile or just have a face picture; they often do not have a lot of tweets; and very little information in the profile. If I cannot figure out who or what the follower is about by glancing at their profile, I don’t follow them back. You can use an online service to validate followers but this extra step HUGELY discourages people from following you.
Many Inactive Twitter Users have Great Profiles: Unfortunately lots of very good contacts in Twitter no longer use the system. Either they get tired of Twitter or burned out or whatever. There are a lot of awesome but inactive people on Twitter and it does you very little good to follow them. I look at the last tweet date before I follow anyone to see if they have tweeted within a month and if they have not, I move on to the next prospect.
Automatic Following would be Awesome if There Weren’t So Many Spammers on Twitter: There are a lot of dubious services out there that offer to build up your twitter list to thousands of people and this creates a huge perverse incentive for scammers. It is a catch 22 because it feels rude on the one hand not to follow people who follow you but I do not want to encourage spammers either.
Tap Into the Power of Twitter Lists: There is a site called http://listorious.com/ that provides lots of information about lists people have created in Twitter. It is a great way of finding good people to follow in your field. I wish I had known about this on Day 1 before I followed 2,000 people because I would have made different choices. I feel lists are a very powerful way to locate people similar to you on Twitter. I played around a bit with Formulists but I read that they can spam people so I stopped using this service. I do feel you should do some research on Twitter apps before you use them because when you sign up for one, you give them a fair amount of power over your Twitter account and when you stop using one, make sure to go into your Twitter settings and disable the application from running.
Use TweetedTimes.com NOT Paper.li to Aggregate Content from People You Follow: There are so many streams of information coming into my Twitter account that I could not easily monitor it. So I looked for a content aggregator to help me make sense of all the data. Unfortunately I initially chose paper.li for this because someone sent me a link to it and I thought it was a good system. I realized later that the newspapers looked very poor quality so I searched the web for sites like paper.li and came up with http://tweetedtimes.com which I like a lot better. I created newspapers for each of my lists and they sort the articles each day by relevance and popularity. This allows me to focus on important resources in each of the fields I am interested in and saves me a huge amount of time.
About Bill Austin
Reiki Master Bill Austin is a spiritual healer, teacher, artist, writer and visionary living in St Petersburg, FL. He is the founder of several energy healing modalities and he specializes in distant healing, spiritual growth videos, healing art and healer training. He provides numerous free healing resources and a powerful line of energy healing products. Please follow Bill on Twitter!
