This is a guest post by Leo Widrich.
It was less than 6 months ago that I decided to fully start out on Twitter. I soon got sucked in to a fantastic environment of helpful and knowledgeable tweeps.
I was blogging for a while before. Vividly I applied some key lessons I learnt and my experience was that it worked extremely well on Twitter too.
The most important part was that it came naturally because I was already used to these techniques.
1.) Don’t Rant – Copy Counts
Fortunately the time when Twitter was a ranting tool you would use to put your thoughts out to no one and anyone is gone.
I like to see Twitter as a microblogging tool in the literal sense. Creating compelling copy that is both attractive to click through and carrying an honest and sincere message is key. Make your Tweets great.
One thing I did right from the start is always write my own tweets. After all my Twitter stream is like my stream of blogposts. Giving them a personal voice is key to create a genuine appearance. What I means I that whenever I am reading a great article I would change the headline so it would suit my voice.
2.) Every Single Comment – Every Single @Mention & RT
When you start out Dino Dogan, a blogger I truly appreciate for his honesty in blogging, taught me that no matter what, replying to each and every comment is key. After all it means people have taken the time to go beyond reading and taken out extra time to expand on your discussion.
In a similar way I try going about any mentions or retweets I receive. Showing gratitude for each and every time someone interacts with you is the least thing I can do if someone is interested.
This leads to an incredible amount of more interactions and helped me immensely to reach my own goals.
3.) It’s Not About the “Me, Me, Meâ€
What blogging taught me right from the start was that I had to lose the self-centered attitude. Listening to others, learning from others and contributing to other’s sites in forms of comments and guestposts is absolute key to reach any measure of success.
In a similar manner the only way to move forward on Twitter centers around Zig Ziglars
“You will get all you want in life if you help enough other people get what they want.â€
Promoting others as often as possible is crucial I found. Retweet others sincerely, give credit to the author for tweeting posts or simply write tweets of appreciation.
And yes, like magic this leads to you achieving your own goals all by yourself.
4.) Leave Your Home Turf
Building a community and enlarging your readership doesn’t come by staying in your own home all day. Yes, it can be a tricky process to keep up the care for existing people you interact with, whilst you are out making new connections. Yet, it is the only way to move forward.
In a similar manner you have to move out of the safety of your own community on Twitter and make an effort in finding new friends. On Twitter there thankfully exist a ton of valuable directories, such as Twellow and Wefollow, helping me to do that.
Balancing out on these two activities has helped me greatly to continually drive new conversations, especially by making use of mentioned directories.
5.) Consistency is Key
Consistency in blogging is the lifeline to success I believe. If it wasn’t for the advice I read to create promotional calendars, schedule blogposts and learn to find my own zone to create the way would have been a lot harder.
Twitter is one ongoing conversation and I found largely a similar pattern applies. Providing an ongoing stream of high quality content is absolutely key. Making use of scheduling tweets, which are of course still your genuine own ones is one part that helps me greatly. Another point that helped me greatly to start out is to assign writing times to tweets in the same way I did to posts.
Now some of these things might change over time. As you continue to grow, you might not need to leave your home turf that aggressively any more.
Or you just can’t find the time to reply to all tweets anymore. Yet, in order to get things going and to focus on the interaction, these 5 lessons helped me a great deal.
I am sure you too have come across many things in life where you could apply lessons learnt in one area to a new one.
How about blogging and Twitter? Do you think there is something we can apply in both areas?
I would love to hear your views below.
