John's Blog

     In my last post I promised to share with you my thoughts on how to grow a robust community on Twitter.  This has nothing to do with building a large number of followers, however.  If you want that, read my tongue-in-cheek post here on this subject.  Social communication, and by extension the use of Twitter, should be focused on transparency, on open and honest communication, on relationship building.  Yes, this will ultimately lead to positive brand awareness, increased sales, and possibly even world peace; but it will not happen overnight.

If you are interested, here are my thoughts on how you should get started on Twitter:

• 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 communications are 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 corporate goals.
• Identify and install the right set of tools.
  • While I primarily use Tweetdeck there are dozens of great Twitter clients available.  Check out Seesmic, CoTweet, and PeopleBrowsr first.  If these do not meet your needs, let me know.
  • Use Tools like MrTweet and Twellow to begin identifying people who share your interest.
  • Once you are following people, start using TweetPlus which allows you to monitor the blogging of the people in your Twitter community.  You will learn a lot this way.
• When you have the right Twitter client installed, leverage search within your client to monitor conversations that are relevant to your areas of interest.  For example, I monitor conversations mentioning CRM, SharePoint, Leadership.
• Focus on adding value, not on pitching your company or service.  Respond to others, use RTs (retweets), post links to interesting and relevant articles.  Your first two or three months on Twitter should not have anything at all to do with your business.  Focus on becoming a valuable member of the community first.
• Remember that people do want to know more about the people in the community.  You should share some personal information.  However, I would not send more than 5 - 10% personal tweets and remember that whatever you write will be on the web forever.

     I hope this helps.  Feel free to follow me on Twitter at JohnFMoore and also, if you want my advice on who to follow, just drop me a note and I'll share my opinions with you.

John