Writing for Twitter #1

The world is all atwitter about social networking as Twitter has grown its member community a whopping 1382% between February '08 and February '09, according to NielsenWire.

I am not a Twitter enthusiast, but I have made my peace with it, believing it is here to stay and, when used properly, effective. You could say I hold a jaded opinion, after spending last summer, nearly an hour each day, seven days a week, tweeting and building up a community of followers. I was doing that for a very specific reason. I'll tell all in my January 2010 EWA. In the final analysis, if you're in business, and if you're smart about it, and if have something to say, Twitter can bring business to you. It is just another marketing tool. As more people become inured with Twitter, choosing not to use it becomes idiosyncratic, if not downright counterproductive. As I said, it's here to stay.

What is Twitter all about? The fantasy may be that Twitter is all about telling your thousands of followers in one 140-charcater tweet that you're getting on a plane and you just had the most horrid time weaving through traffic in a taxi to the airport. The reality is far different. Twitter is about branding. Twitter is a tactical-level tool you can use to communicate your brand to a specific community of "followers."

What is a brand? It is a public identity, something that resonates with clients, customers, partners and/or consumers. It's what people think of when they think of you. Businesses have brands, but so do rock musicians, fine artists, building contractors, rocket engineers, novelists, scientists, owners of janitorial services, journalists, symphony conductors and analysts of every stripe. Everyone who is in business and wants to be known for what they do should have a clearly articulated brand that helps them attract business on the web. Twitter can help define that brand and make it available to large numbers of people who can become potential consumers of the brand.

After using Twitter for about a year, and listening to smart, well informed people talk about Twitter, I've come to the conclusion that even those who use Twitter to have water-cooler type conversations about last night's Madmen or Lost episode, or those who comment on "trending topics" like Tiger Woods' debacle, are using Twitter to broadcast their brand. Your tweets are your brand, and that's perfectly okay. Twitter is about trending topics. It's about public unrest in Iran that was beamed outside Iran thanks to Twitter. It's about the guy who runs the corner service station giving car repair advice and sending customers links where they can download discount coupons. It's about an analyst tweeting quick impressions from the floor of a trade show. Twitter is about all that stuff and more. It's about whatever the users of Twitter want it to be about.
Once you become a Twitter user and establish your profile, you'll find a question that appears above the window where you type your 140-character messages: "What's happening?" To be effective writing tweets, you have to imagine the question reading, "What can you tell your followers that will add meaning or substance to your brand?"

People ask me, "How can you shoehorn everything you want to say into 140 characters?" The answer: Don't. Set up a blog for the content. Then write a short, provocative question or statement and place the link to your blog directly after.

In my case, most of the time, I don't tell my followers what's happening with me. Instead, I give them writing advice. Or to put it another way, given my brand identity, writing advice is what's always happening for me. My brand ExcitingWriting stands for writing excellence. My tweets help people improve their writing. More often, they are teasers designed to cause people to jump on the link to my ExcitingWriting blog (which has content identical to these e-mail newsletters). So the question isn't how to shoehorn everything you want to say into 140 characters. It's how to get people to click on a link.


Here are three examples of promotion-tweets I've used in recent months:

• 13 things you can start doing today to become a better writer. Sept issue of my blog at…

• Six principles that underlie everything going on with social networking. August issue of my blog at…

• Ever notice that non-profits usually ask you to make a pledge? Why is that? Read "commitment" in my Aug. blog entry at…

Another approach to writing tweets is to write a wise-sounding aphorism, for example:

• 


Confused about when to stop researching and start writing, it's probably time to start writing. Read my blog at…

Most people tweet links to articles that are interesting to them and, they hope, to their followers. That's all they do most of the time. They're serving a helpful role by spreading news. Thanks to these tweets, last summer, when I spent about an hour a day on Twitter, I was being exposed to very interesting content I would have never run across anywhere else.

Generally, the helping, "advice giving" model works well in Twitter and is effective at building your brand. If you're out to help someone else, explain the ropes, make life easier, you can't go wrong. It makes you the expert.

A landscaper can give landscaping advice. A mechanic can give car care advice. A technologist can talk about technology trends. A marketer can give marketing advice.

Many enjoy tweeting positive, inspirational quotes, which, I guess, makes them an expert on the meaning of life.

Of course, there are times you will want to join the on-going conversation and then, as I said earlier, it's similar to water-cooler conversations in a workplace. People comment on the show they watched last night—whatever. Often, people give other people encouragement. You get to know some very interesting people that way. Do some of that, if you like. Sometimes you really do want to tell people what's happening in your life at this very moment. (For example, in my case, I could send out a tweet that says I'm nearing completion of a novel I've been working on since May of 2002. It's the truth!) You might throw in some crazy tweets designed to get a laugh, too. For example, "Just took the Aston Martin in for an oil change. $75, they wanted. I raced over to the competition."

Twitter is a fantastic platform for spreading breaking news. And that's where it can be effective in business—if you think of your advice as a form of news, or if you can tie in your expertise with an on-going news story.

Next month: The six steps I followed in building my Twitter following from 1 to 450 in three months, and, more importantly, my purpose in doing so.