Twitter Etiquette

You should learn to treat Twitter seriously, just as you do all of your other business ventures. Learning proper Twitter Etiquette is an important aspect of this.

Don't tweet constantly! This should be obvious, but it's remarkable how many people tweet dozens, even hundreds of times in a single day. Be strategic with your tweets. There is no “magic number” – just use your intuition and you should be fine.

Stay consistent. Tweet every day, or at least every other day. Tweeting once a week or once a month will not accomplish anything – it kind of defeats the purpose of being on Twitter altogether. People will forget who you are and why they decided to follow you in the first place.

Only tweet about things that matter. The occasional “Wow these french fries are tasty” is fine – it shows your followers that you're human and that there's more to you than selling and marketing. But do NOT go overboard.

Usually the people who tweet dozens or hundreds of times a day are tweeting about trivial subjects that no one cares about. If you feel the need to tweet about your shoelaces or the zit on your cheek, register a second, personal Twitter account to share this kind of stuff with friends/family only – NOT your customers or business prospects.

If you want to use Twitter like an instant messaging client, make sure that you are sending Direct Messages rather than publishing your tweets publicly. Chatting with someone over Twitter will clog up your followers' feeds and can be very, very annoying. Users may unfollow you as a result. So use common sense and download MSN or something if you want to chat in real time.

No hard selling. Constantly tweeting “New blog post”, “New ebook buy it now!”, “Great software, check it out”, etc. etc. will not yield great results. Your followers will start viewing your tweets as SPAM. You will not gain a good reputation, you will not build trust, and you will not sell anything. Sorry. Twitter is meant for the SOFT sell – so you'll have to work on that.

This is what annoys me more than anything else, is when you get someone posting a block of tweets. Admittedly I have been guilty of this myself in the past but when you notice loads of people unfollowing you. It's time to realise that they are not happy with what you are doing.