As I continue to spend time on Twitter my understanding of the platform, and how to use it to grow a personal brand, evolves. This post is not intended as my final thoughts on the subject, just a snapshot of my current thinking.
- Define your goals for social communications and how Twitter fits into these goals. Twitter does not address all needs, blogs are still important, face to face communication is still important. Twitter is but one tool and you should first understand how it is used and then how it fits into your overall personal or goals.
- I have spent a lot of time with Tweetdeck during my first few months on Twitter. Lately, however, I find myself spending more time with CoTweet. While it is often billed as a tool for corporate tweeting I highly recommend it for individual use. Scheduling tweets, my favorite feature, is a must if you blog. Twitter users with a community of more than 50 users (aka followers) will not see every tweet you send.
- With CoTweet, schedule key tweets to be sent during prime viewing windows. For example, when I am done writing a blog post that I want to ensure people read, I schedule it to be sent multiple times with a morning tweet around 10 AM and an afternoon tweet around 4 PM. These are great viewing times, make sure your voice is heard.
- Use Tools like MrTweet, Twitter Grader, and TweetPlus. MrTweet will give you a steady supply of recommended people to follow, Twitter Grader will help you understand how you are doing, and TweetPlus will point out where your community is blogging.
- Repeat after me. It is not about you, it is about your community. If you want people to respect you, to value you, you must first respect them and value them. Sounds obvious, yes, but this advice is often ignored.
I won’t bore you with more on this subject tonight. If you’re interested in hearing more, tweet me at @JohnFMoore or leave a comment here.
John
October 12, 2009 at 8:08 am
I agree with the points you have discussed. I have not tried CoTweet. But I use tweet-u-later to schedule my tweets. Since it acts as a platform to share knowledge, personal branding one tries to establish is quite effective.
October 12, 2009 at 11:45 am
Kumuda, thanks for the response, will check it out. -John
October 3, 2009 at 10:08 pm
Thank you for some suggestions on this. I am still relatively new to the “Tweet” and believe it is important to remember the message that gets sent. Is this just personal and random or am I looking to create and convey a professional image? It’s interesting how so many share both.
October 3, 2009 at 10:35 pm
Layne, you must find your own “right” mix. For me it is important to show both personal and professional aspects of my personality. I keep the personal to closer to 10 – 20% of tweets (roughly) but I feel it’s important that you know something about the people you chat with, not just their opinions but who they are as well.
John
October 1, 2009 at 5:59 pm
I have to agree with a couple of the comments here. I have noticed some people I am following send multiple tweets and my reaction is to consider unfollowing them. I get enough tweets flooding in, the multiple tweets just pollute things for me.
As you said “it is not about you, it is about your community” and to me sending multiple tweets on the same topic is more about the person tweeting than his community of followers.
Just my thoughts.
October 1, 2009 at 6:05 pm
Carla, you are very right. The multiple tweets are always my blog entries and it is definitely “hey, check me out stuff”. I try to ensure that it’s a very small percentage of my tweets, however, time will tell if I am balaning well or not.
Thank you for weighing in, it is appreciated.
John
October 1, 2009 at 8:44 am
Thanks for the suggestions; will look at CoTweet
@simon_g
September 30, 2009 at 10:39 pm
Interesting comments John, thanks for sharing. I have to admit I’m a bit uncomfortable with the “I schedule it to be sent multiple times.” I’m not sure I want to see multiple identical tweets, as it is hard enough to keep up with original Tweets, but I understand your intent. Thanks for the tip on CoTweet – I use Tweet Deck, but I’ll check this out.
@thomricci
September 30, 2009 at 10:11 pm
Intersting post as always, just one slight concern. The danger of posting the same article mutliple times is that you appear spammy and annoy followers. This is especially true of followers who do not themselves follow thousands. There are many people I follow that will post about the same article several times per day, everytime someone posts a comment etc and this is just frustrating, more so if I have already read the article and moved on.
As always there is a delicate balance between broadcasting enough that everyone hears, and not too much that you annoy. The balance is best found by asking your followers.
September 30, 2009 at 9:56 pm
Very insightful and practical, John. Excellent advice. Thanks for sharing.
September 30, 2009 at 2:41 pm
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September 30, 2009 at 11:18 am
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October 1, 2009 at 10:15 am
As a personal fan of Twitter, I also think it has a big role in CRM. Thank you for the tips, I’ll check out Co-Tweet. I’ve been using Seesmic for managing my accounts and TweetLater for scheduling, but perhaps there’s a better way.
In regard to repeating tweets, I think it’s perfectly reasonable as not everyone is going to see the initial wave. Another way to keep it fresh is to highlight a different angle of the link, so frequency is still obtained by the message doesn’t become worn out.
Thanks again John.