Twitter Best Practices

Here are some best practices when using Twitter:

1. Keep your tweets educational, entertaining, and relevant. Don’t bother tweeting the mundane. Be creative.
2. Use Twitter’s native URL shortening service. This allows links to be shortened but retain original information about the URL so that it shows up, fully expanded, in your followers stream.
3. Don’t retweet compliments. This is considered bragging and is insulting to your followers.
4. Don’t dot reply (i.e. “. @example Original text here.”). This causes your reply to show up in the stream of everyone that follows you instead of those that follow you and the person you are replying too. This is annoying to those who follow you but don’t follow everyone you follow. Remember, time is precious, not everyone wants to read everything you tweet about.
5. Don’t enable services that auto-tweet your activities. Examples: Path, Gowalla, FourSquare, flight statuses, weight scales, etc. These activities are mundane and boring. Nobody cares.
6. Don’t cross the streams! Differentiate your tweets from your site feed and/or other syndicated services, otherwise you end up spamming followers and losing credibility.
7. Don’t follow someone that averages more than 10 tweets a day.
8. Don’t post more than 10 tweets a day (on average).
9. Limit the reading of tweets to three times a day (morning, noon, and night) or less.
10. Use services like Instapaper to save tweets that link to articles which require more time to read. Doing this will allow you to parse your timeline quickly without being bogged down with the longer length articles.

Tags: Twitter

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