Five More Things You Need to Know About Twitter

Here is an example of how I found people with common interests as me. I am an author (or at least, this is how I describe myself). I have a literary agent. People who follow a literary agent are for the most part, aspiring authors like me.
|

My Twitter Philosophy. Continued.

Find PART ONE by looking at all the articles I have published.

You can "steal" someone else's IMAGE and use it in your tweet! You can tweet an image of Scarlett Johansson (my wife already knows I think Scarlett is the most beautiful woman in the world) and you can tweet: "This is the woman I would like to have dinner with tonight". It's legal to do this!

But please don't tweet 30 times with the same image! What are you thinking?

5. BUILD a FOLLOWING. Followers will not come to you out of their own free will. No matter who you are (unless you are Justin Bieber), they will NOT find you. You must find them.

Every single day follow new people. Be proactive about this. Follow people with common interests as you. Follow people with no common interests as you.

Here is an example of how I found people with common interests as me. I am an author (or at least, this is how I describe myself). I have a literary agent. People who follow a literary agent are for the most part, aspiring authors like me.

Need I say more?

6. WHEN SMALL, SAY HELLO. Welcome each and every new follower with a personal greeting. In some cases I strike up a short chat with my new follower. This establishes a personal connection and frequently leads to re-tweets.

7. WHEN BIG, SMILE. When you have 35,000 followers (and another 100 new ones every day), you simply do not have time to welcome each and every new follower with a personal greeting. In fact, you probably barely have time to notice new followers coming in.

I go into my list of Followers once a day, at the same time every day, and go down the list to see who has shown up at my doorstep. If the follower's description (not his/her picture) looks like it was written by a real human being, I will click "Follow". If the account looks fake (picture of Garfield, an image of a celebrity) or if the account has private tweets, I click "Block".

The many attempts to sell you fake Twitter followers constitute a worldwide plague. I do not relate favorably to anyone whose tweets cannot be seen in the public Twitterverse. Those are the red lines of my Twitter Philosophy.

If there is anything in between my choices for "Follow" and "Block" - I will not click anything. These people, apparently not too interesting in their daily lives, are free to follow me.

A word about TrueTwit. This is the service that makes you write in some words after seeing squiggly characters against a colorful background. You can do this. Or you don't need to bother. Whatever.

8. UNFOLLOW. Just because someone followed you doesn't mean he/she should follow you. Yes, you heard that right. Your followers have no right to follow you unless you agree. Get rid of the garbage. Every day. Block anyone trying to sell you something and any profile that says "you can get thousands of followers." You could do this one by one (if your list of followers is small), or you can use a free, user-friendly program like ManageFlitter.

9. TWEET NO MATTER THE SIZE OF YOUR FOLLOWING. No additional words necessary.

10. RETWEET YOUR OWN TWEETS. Here's my thinking, and please correct me if I'm wrong. If you are following a lot of people and you go onto your Twitter feed at 10pm, you will only see the tweets from the past two or three hours. That means, if I last tweeted at 5am (in your time zone), you will never see my tweet.

I have a lot of articles on my blog and I rotate them in my tweets. Usually I send out four types of tweets every day: One about Bulgaria / one about Israel / one about the craft of writing / and one a book review. Here is what I do. Sometimes I tweet humorous posts that I've written, like the connection between poker and sex. I tweet each of these 140-character babies once every two hours. That means, in the course of two hours - four tweets in total.

If you log in at 5pm, or if you log in at 11pm, you will only see four of my tweets in the past two hours. But, I've covered myself by tweeting to people in New Zealand, India, Ireland, and New Mexico. Everywhere in the world, you will only see me tweeting good content tweets - one tweet every 30 minutes.

There, that's my Twitter Philosophy. Sorry that I couldn't write it all down in less than 140 characters, but I had a lot to share.

And that's the final word.

Share.

Related article: