5 Tips to make Twittering more meaningful by increasing the signal to noise ratio

You can only find two type of people on Twitter. The one’s who’ve really found the gold mine on Twitter and the one’s who’re still trying. There are possibly none who doesn’t have a clue about anything.

We all started from zero and I’m guessing most of us would’ve gone through more or less the same thought process.

Registered on Twitter, put your name in there, start a profile and boink !! What next ?

In fact, that’s not a bad start. Because the moment you start adding friends and strangers, you come to terms with reality – that this is a huge network and you’re only at the one millionth string. From there on, provided you get the basics right, its a snow ball effect.

Illustration Courtesy – Hubspot

But its also possible that somewhere down the line, you could drift away. Especially if you don’t stick around and find time to listen to the crowd. The beauty about social media (Twitter in this case) is that there’s a lot of conversation happening around and if you got to make the most of friends, you got to listen well. You CANNOT make sense if you assume things your way, and go ahead with a hidden agenda. One needs to listen well, get to know the pulse of the crowd, tastes, likes and dislikes to be one of them.

Twitter has a different purpose for each person using it. For some, its a marketing tool, while for some its a learning channel. Based on how you see it, Twitter can be a powerful tool serving your purpose be it business or personal.

So, with that in mind, lets see how Twittering can be a meaningful thing to the most of us.

1. Twitter is an “Open Content” platform. Figure out what you can do with it.

As I said, people use Twitter differently. For instance, some people (like a friend of mine in the media industry) are listeners on Twitter. They subscribe to top news feeds and profiles and are on the constant watch out for news bites. They don’t converse much but discover valuable feeds and subscribe to them. That’s all that they do, but that makes a lot of sense to them. All they need is fresh news and information and Twitter is the best tool online to get it. So its all about finding out what you can do with Twitter, everyone can’t be Guy Kawasaki or Gary Vaynerchuck, but still you could be heroes in your own respect.

2. If you’re into business, find out how your products can help the community, but please don’t “sell”

Community may be the wrong word here, because Twitter is a multifaceted cluster. I can’t possibly single out one common factor in all Twitter users. The group is diverse and there are multi groups, circles and regions. If you’re into business and wants to use Twitter to your advantage, don’t just jump into it blindly, like you do in SEM/Online Marketing. By just having a profile that “sells” your stuff, you’re not going to attract your clients. Because the crowd is not in a “buying mode”, you have to convince them that your product can be useful to them. Unless you can do it, you’re going to be spammed.
Essentially, its about matching the community energy and moving along. Don’t sell.. just hang around there, if there are any that might genuinely get interested in your products, they may..just may buy it, but that’s about it.

3. Make your own rules, no guru could possibly know what you really need

The weird thing is that there are many preachers than practitioners. I mean, how could someone who’s marketing his e-book tell you how to create your twitter profile ? Its for you to find out what you really need from Twitter. Friends / Marketing / Fun – you figure out and make your own rules. So what if someone said, don’t use Twitter like a chat tool ? If you think you can make more friends chatting, go with it, who’s stopping you ?

4. Numbers don’t really matter but quality of your followers does

One thing that many of us tend to get smitten by is the follower number. In fact, getting a lot of followers on Twitter isn’t a big deal (look at me for example ), but whether your followers are quality tweeps in indeed valuable. By quality I mean responsiveness, agility, connections, influence etc. And there are a lot of influent people with less follower numbers on Twitter. You can spot them counting their enormous number of ReTweets or mentions.

5. Engage with your followers, don’t get preachy ( unless you’re a celebrity ) and open up

Celebrities don’t have to try too hard right ? But, a major chunk of us aren’t celebrities, so lets have our own rules.

Having said that, this is a tricky situation to be in. You don’t have influence, you have a very small circle of friends, you aren’t listed on the “Most charismatic people on Twitter” or some absurd list like that. What do you do, engage with whom ?

If I were you, I would open up. Of course that doesn’t mean non-engagement with my friends, but finding new and interesting people, would probably may share your likes and dislikes. I use the twitter search functions and recommendation engines like Mr.Twitter to find similar people, and most of the times they respond positively to my “call”. Its not going to be a roller coaster ride where you say a simple “hi” and he follows you – no. You got be seriously interesting (at least show that you are) and get interested in the other guys profile to start a conversation. Even though slowly, this method works and the beauty is that whoever you made friends with this way, even though small in number would be the most responsive, friendly and supportive in the entire Twitter community. And that’s exactly what we need.

Summary:

Essentially, the idea is that Twitter is an open community surprisingly simple that you have a lot of focus on personality and character. You got to be seriously interesting to get friends, and there is no thumb rule to success on Twitter. You can “use” the community to your own needs, and provided your need is okay with the majority of the crowd, you’d probably survive. People see twitter differently, its a unique tool for each person using it and in however small amounts you can everyone meets success daily on Twitter and that’s the beauty of it.

Hope it all made sense. Keep tweeting

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