Twitter-mania is taking the airways by storm!  Everyone is talking about Twitter, including Jon Stewart!   It’s got the hockey-stick growth curve we’ve all dreamed about.  If used right, it’s a powerful networking tool.  If used poorly, it’s just another form of spam, which no one likes.  The key is to build a PERMISSION asset.  After twittering, or being on twit, or tweeting, errr whatever, for a while now, here are some practical tips for proper tweeting.  I’ll assume you already know what it is, but if not, click here and check it out on wikipedia.

1.  Use Tweetdeck.  Don’t ask questions, just do it.  13% of all twitter users use tweet deck, which is amazing.  It’s a great way to break up the noise into manageable pieces of information.

2.  Use your blog to generate followers.  Be sure to have a “Follow me on twitter” widget on your blog.  Create tons of content, which builds up your personal brand, which drives people to twitter, which leads to more followers, which leads to more traffic to your blog, etc.  It’s a game of numbers.

2.5  Own a niche.  If I were doing your introduction in less than 20 words, what would you want to me to say?  What’s your thing?  If you lack a niche, get one because there’s no room in the Google economy for people stuck on page 2 in search results.  You have to be the best.  Sorry, that’s just the way it is.  Be patient.  My personal brand isn’t worth much, but it’s growing.  With your niche, send twitter updates about your niche and build a base of people with similar interests.  Slow and steady wins the race.  Of course you can post fun, personal stuff, but you need to command a niche.

3.  Avoid spamming.  There’s a difference between permission marketing and interruption marketing.  With permission marketing, there’s a relationship (consent) between both parties.  One agrees to listen to the other i.e. a subscription to a blog.  With interruption marketing i.e. television ads, one hopes to catch a smidgeon of your attention (interrupt you during a ballgame) to influence your decisions.  In the twitter world, most people you “Follow” will Follow you back.  It’s considered good manners.  But, if you follow thousands of people with the hopes that they follow you back, thus giving you tons of followers, which gives you a larger audience for your messages, that’s no different than spamming.

I figured this out after following a bagillion people.  After a while, it didn’t make any sense.  With Twitter, you’re trying to build a “permission asset,” which means you’re trying to build relationships.  If you’re following tons of people you don’t care about, and they’re all doing the same thing, it ends up being a bunch of people sending messages hoping that a few slip through the cracks and get noticed i.e. spam.  I love Tim Ferriss’s approach.  He has an enormous permission asset.  When people follow Tim, they know exactly what to expect.  Recently, he’s added over 5000 followers in a few days.  Thousands of people want to know what he’s doing, which makes twitter a great platform for him.  He’s got a niche.  And unlike most people, he follows less than a couple of hundred.

4.  Slip past the filters–  Or to paraphrase, build relationships.  If you’re like most people, you probably follow more than a few hundred people.  If you follow over 100, you’re really following nobody.  It’s true.  But with Tweetdeck and other Twitter apps, you can create streams of info from people you manually select.  If there’s someone with influence that you’d like to follow on a regular basis, you can separate them from the pack by adding them to a group.  Now that everyone has a filter, you need to make it out of the “everyone column” and into their “preferred list” column.  Get my drift?

Here’s how you do it.  Own a niche.  Post often.  Post quality updates.  Be helpful.  Retweet.  Be re-tweeted.

5.  Measure influence.  The whole point of twitter is to increase your influence.  I mean, be honest.  It’s to network, right?  If you post a message, how many people actually read it?  When Guy Kawasaki posts a link on twitter, he damn near melts down the servers.  If you’ve got a blog and you’ve got Google analytics set up (or something else), link to your blog via twitter and see how much traffic you’re driving.  If you have over 20,000 followers and you get 3 clicks from your link, guess what, nobody is listening.

Oh, and I almost forgot…..you can follow me on twitter at: http://twitter.com/kevin_thompson

Cheers!