Sunday, 23 November 2008
How To Use Twiiter To Connect With The Right People
One element of twitter that leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth is the ‘popularity’ contest factor. It seems that a lot of people/companies/spammers follow you on twitter just to get a mutual follow from you, i.e. they follow your twitter updates just so you follow their twitter updates.
This constitutes a very superficial use of twitter. It’s the interactions, the knowledge transfers and information updates from a group of like minded peers that make twitter so powerful. So if you can avoid the popularity game and if you want to genuinely connect with people on twitter, I suggest this approach.
1. Go to twitter search and type in a subject, event, news headline that interests you and see who’s talking about it.
2. Look through what the people are saying about your particular area of interest, who is shedding an interesting light on it? Who do you feel you want to hear more from?
3. If a twitter user you’re interested in links to an interesting post or to some good information. Tweet about it.
For example, if a user, let’s say his user name is JohnSmith, has linked through to a good post on online marketing in china. You could tweet about it like this:
@JohnSmith takes an indepth look at online marketing in china.
4. The effect of this is twofold. 1) You are brining value to this member by linking to his post/information 2) Using the ‘@username’ reply approach, you’re making this user aware that you’ve highlighted his information.
Adding value in your interaction with this member will make it all the more
likely that they will follow your tweets and possibly even highlight some of your posts/information. This takes things goes beyond a popularity contest, you’re actually providing each other with value. From there you can have some really great interactions. Discuss issues, share mutually interesting information and actually make the social nature of twitter work for you.
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