Twitter is often regarded as the next great social media tool, but in order to effectively market on Twitter you first need to understand how to effectively use Twitter.
In my line of work as a web developer, online marketer, and designer I need to keep up on a stunning array of topics in order to stay current and continue to evolve my own skills.
What Twitter does exceptionally well is providing a platform where I can search for specific terms and hash tags, save them, and have a feed that supplies me with a constant feed dedicated to each particular interest I wish to monitor.
In its own way Twitter becomes a sort of newspaper/magazine as these both report the latest news and information that is sorted out into sections. To illustrate the point, here is the step-by-step that I would follow if I were looking to make a new Twitter account for my own personal use, magazines style!
Step 1: Evaluating Your Twitter Needs
In my example I'm going to declare that I want the most latest and popular content on web design, web development, and local business opportunities. However, you can focus your attention to areas that fit your needs by creating streams.
Now if I do Twitter searches for my general terms I may get some good results, but the odds of the Tweets in the stream being what I'm really looking for aren't the greatest. In this case it would be better to go a bit deeper and think in terms that are more specific to my interests.
Since Web Design, Web Development, and Local Business are a bit too general, here's an idea of the direction I would take:
- Drupal 7 (development)
- HTML5 (development)
- ecommerce (development)
- CSS3 (design)
- Photoshop Tip (design)
- @SPACC (local Chamber of Commerce)
The more specific I am with identifying my needs the more likely the tweets are to be relevant to what I'm looking for. Instead of having a magazine with a generic web design section I now have a CSS3 section and a Photoshop section!
So now that I've identified what I'm really looking to get out of Twitter it's time to start piecing together the magazine in the next step.
Step 2: Set Up Your Saved Searches
The quality of your main Twitter stream is only as good as the quality of those you're following. In other words, Twitter is who you follow so you always want to do a bit of due diligence first before inviting (following) potential "contributors" to your stream.
By creating saved searches that are specific to what you desire you get a general overview of the pool of contributors in that area.
Some are just spamming, but others are consistent in delivering valuable content and those are precisely the people that you want to follow.
Step 3: Adding Contributors To Your Twitter "Magazine"
Twitter may only give you 140 characters to work with, but this limitation is what makes sharing thrive. Most blogs, articles, and news stories have some sort of Tweeting capability these days and tweets are often used as a pithy gateway to the full content.
When you arrive on good quality content from a tweet in your saved searches it's a good idea to go to that "Tweep's" tweets and look over the content they share. Often times it only takes a couple in each area of interest to give you more than enough constant quality content.
I often look for Tweeps (Twitter users) who share links to quality content more than I do for simple musings. My goal with this pseudo-magazine I'm creating is to give me a constantly updating table of contents of quality content that I need to read to stay current.
Step 4: Maintaining Your Magazine
Your primary Twitter stream acts as the perpetual table of contents to your personal magazine custom tailored to the news and information you're interested in.
Nowadays it's to be expected that you will see somewhere on nearly any given web page a Twitter icon encouraging you to follow the site. Again it's worth checking out their tweets to see if what they're posting is something you would like to invite into your stream.
In my industry there's a website called www.smashingmagazine.com that is hands down one of my favorite websites and do a phenomenal job at providing great tweets.
Most industries have well regarded resources and they get shared quite a bit (for good reason). Take a look at the Tweets on Smashing Magazine's Twitter page here for a good example of a terrific follow.
Some Finishing Thoughts on Using Twitter
If you use Twitter as a consumer you'll know what it's like to be marketed to, but on the other hand you begin to appreciate the role of good content and what makes something shareable.
Retweeting tweets that link to great content gives others a good reason to follow you as you are giving an editorial screening through all the content you are surfing through.
In this way you become established and also do your part in voting up quality out of the quantity because what you retweet can be found in the saved searches where you put yourself in the position to be auditioned and followed!