If you’re getting used to twitter the good news is it doesn’t have to take more than 12 minutes a day to get valuable results from this excellent networking, news source, and marketing tool: twitter doesn’t have to be a time gobbling monster. A number of LinkedIn professionals expressed in recent group discussions that they felt twitter activity can be counter-productive. Here’s my take on how to turn a potential time consumer into a productive professional tool.
Note: I’ve provided a 6 step guide on what 12 minutes a day might look like at the bottom of this article.
Tips That Can Improve Quality and Streamline Activity
1. Share only one new quality comment a day. You don’t have to generate volumes of information to be interesting. We did a bit of searching and were able to find a number of people on twitter with over 1,000 followers who made only 5-10 comments a week.
2. Skim and sample information. Similar to reading a newspaper or magazine browse for meaningful information. There is no pressure to stay on top of everyone and everything.
3. Skip 2 days a week. There’s no need to be on it every day. Set an expectation with your following that you’re a quality time manager and they’ll appreciate you for who you are.
4. Choose how many quality relationships you want to create. Because all new relationships take effort to build, decide how many new contacts you want to create meaningful interaction with. If you spread yourself too thin you’ll have too much to stay on top of. Keep it simple.
5. Don’t follow people that tweet things you’re not interested in. As your following grows you’ll get people that say things that aren’t valuable to you. Simply select that person and unfollow them. This will streamline content and make what you do pay attention to more valuable.
6. Look for quality contacts to followers versus quantity. Your twitter following will become your unique community attracted to your content and see value in what you share/tweet. Looking for people to follow you can consume huge amounts of time – keep this effort to a quality minimum.
7. Do include your twitter address on your communications. The people you’re talking to already are the ones that will be most interested in what you’re saying, let them know you’re on twitter and you’ll see your audience grow. Include your address on email and marketing communications when possible.
8. Be yourself and be transparent. One of the cultural rules on twitter is authenticity. If you spend all your time promoting and selling you’ll find it difficult to get people interested in you. If you provide real information about what you do the sale will come as a result of your credibility.
9. Try helpful 3rd party technologies to measure and manage twitter activity.
Hootsuite – “HootSuite is the ultimate Twitter toolbox. With HootSuite, you can manage multiple Twitter profiles, add multiple editors, pre-schedule tweets, and measure your success.”
Twhirl – Some of twhirl’s features are: shorten urls, integrate multiple social media networks, reporting, searching, spell check, finds tweets mentioning your @username
A Six Steps Guide – 12 minutes of twitter a day can look like this:
1) Share your one quality thought. Be authentic, don’t sell. Offer good value to your followers.
2) Skim over past tweets for interesting information.
3) Check your Direct Messages. Reply to anyone that requires it.
4) Leave 2-4 Direct Messages for people you want to build relationships with.
5) Retweet 1 useful piece of information to your following.
6) Search for 1 person to follow that you want to learn from or get valuable updates.
Author: Andrew Ballenthin
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Excise Tax
