Thursday, January 14, 2010

Writing for Twitter #2

As I wrote last month, I am not a Twitter enthusiast, but I have made my peace with it. Twitter is about influencing others to your way of thinking, or, at least, getting on other people's radar, making connections, etc. That's why it's a social networking platform, and why I believe that it's all about branding. The assumption is that Twitter users influence their ''followers.'' What are followers? Think of Twitter as a specialized e-mail application that lets you send out very short messages to a select opt-in list. What is an ''opt-in'' list? Each month, I send this content in an e-mail newsletter to an opt-in list, to people who have chosen to receive it. My opt-in list is now 2,000+. In the Twitter world, your opt-in list comprises all those who have chosen to receive your tweets. Those are your followers.

While you have followers (people receiving your tweets), you also have the people you're following. Those are the people whose short messages, or tweets, you're receiving. Just because you choose to follow someone doesn't mean that person will then follow you.

Generally speaking, Twitter experts say you don't want to follow more people than follow you. There are plenty of exceptions, for example, someone who follows Hollywood celebrities who never follow them back. That's a perfectly valid way to use Twitter; however, if you want to use Twitter for branding purposes, you should balance the number of your followers and the number of people you are following, or, better yet, have far more followers.

If everyone who you followed was following you back, you would have a closed loop. You would develop a community of followers, which would promote branding. If you make a point of thinking about the brand attributes you wish to project as you write your tweets, you are more likely to be successful with your Twitter campaign. Followers will re-tweet your tweets to their followers. Your reputation could spread. That is how Twitter works.

There are nifty applications that look at your followers and the people they follow and let you ''un-follow'' those who are not following you. The reason they're popular: People use them to help balance those two numbers I mentioned above. The application I've used effectively to do this is Huitter.

I covered reciprocity in a past EWA. If someone does something nice to you, it's only human nature to want to return the favor. Many Twitter marketers depend on that: ''If I follow you, you'll follow me back.'' I recommend that you be very picky about the people you follow back. The numbers of Twitter ''marketers'' are legion. They will follow you expressly hoping you will follow them back so they can then clog your ''stream'' (your ''stream'' is the list of tweets on your home page) with commercials for ''business opportunities,'' nutrition drinks, weight-loss regimens, or the like.

Two dirty little secrets about Twitter:

#1 While the fantasy about Twitter may be that of celebrities using it to communicate with thousands of fans instantaneously, the reality is that even if you have 20,000 followers, only a fraction are online at any given time. This accounts for Twitter scheduling applications, which let you load up plenty of tweets at one time and then tweet throughout the day at regular intervals, thereby increasing the likelihood of actually influencing your followers. If you're interested, google ''Twitter scheduling applications.''

#2 Tweets have a life span of about five minutes. That is, within five minutes after you send it out, everybody online at that time has seen it. After that, it's toast. Ancient history. There's one important exception to that: If your followers are passionately interested in what you have to say, they can do a search on your Twitter handle. You can fill any Twitter user name into the search box and click on the magnifying glass. Every one of that Twitter user's recent tweets will come up. The follower can browse through them at his or her convenience. (In fact you don't have to be a follower of that person to do that. Anyone can do that search on any Twitter user, if they know the handle. If they don't, they can look it up by clicking on ''Find People'' at the top of the page.

Next month: the six-step method I used to build my Twitter following from 1 to 450 in three months, and why I chose to do so.

Note: Last month's EWA drew plenty of positive reviews and thank-yous. I appreciate them all.