Tips to Initiate Conversations
- Get great followers. Focus on quality rather than quantity.
- Offer compelling, interesting news. Offer how-tos, news, and freebies or contests.
- Ask questions and re-post best answers. Use TweetBrain to reach beyond your own followers.
- Follow relevant people.
- Don’t start posts with an @ symbol.
- Use Owl.ly or Bit.ly to shorten URLs.
- Retweet, but give credit. Use the retweet button sparingly. Use “Please RT (re-tweet)” as research suggests that the phrase generates a lot of re-tweeting.
- Post pictures with TwitPic or Yfrog, which offer count views.
- Guide to Twitter chats http://bit.ly/iiM7L0
Identify People and Groups to Follow
- Use list-making features like Twitter’s list feature, Listorious, which provides a directory of accounts by common tags. Plexus Engine finds accounts by topic and compiles lists.
- WeFollow organizes Twitters by topic.
News Monitoring
- Snapbird allows you to search tweets of followers to determine what news is of interest to them.
- Check What the Trend, which lists trending topics and a brief description of each. Twopular that gives trending topics over time and tells how many hours a topic trended. Trendistic compares and graphs trends.
- Monitor tweets using TweetDeck, which is helpful for keeping an eye on the same searches every day, or Monitter, which is helpful for tracking live events. TweetGrid follows conversations in real-time.
Organization Features
- Use Trends feature to assess the fastest-growing words or phrases being tweeted in a moment.
- Create keyword searches on Twitter to uncover emerging trends and reTweet/Tweet news angles. Check What the Trend to figure out current, popular hashtags.
- Hashtags.org also shows popular hashtags and statistics.
- Use Seesmic allows access to a variety of social media accounts (e.g., Facebook, LinkedIn, FourSquare, etc.) and allows scheduling of tweets. Can also track activity of those you follow. TweetDeck is another option.
- Use HootSuite to coordinate news feeds on Facebook, LinkedIn, Google +, and Twitter simultaneously.