Ready to Tweet and Twellow
Now that you have your profile set up just the way you want it, you’re ready to tweet.
(If you’re profile is not yet set up, see Getting Starting on Twitter.
When you’re just starting out, I usually recommend putting up at least 10 tweets over your first couple of days. You want to have about a dozen before you start following people.
Tip: It’s fine to start following your personal contacts before you’ve built up your first dozen tweets. Twitter will find your personal contacts for you. Click “find people” in the top right Twitter navigation, and then click the “find on other networks” tab and enter your email log in information. Twitter will present you with a list of users that match addresses in your contacts. Tick the ones you want to be connected to on Twitter and click “follow”.
As for following people that have never met you, you want to have put a few tweets out there so folks will have a sense of who you are and what you’re about. Your tweets and your bio are how they’ll determine whether to “follow you back”. Be sure to make your tweets compelling so that people will want to be in conversation with you. I recommend not immediately including URLs to your company or product website when you’re starting out.
If you’re planning to market your product or services on Twitter, you’ll want to find people with similar interests – these are the people who will be interested in your website URL when the time is right! Here’s one of my favorite tools for finding those folks: Twellow (The Twitter yellow pages – http://www.twellow.com). In Twellow, you can search by category, just like in the phone book. You can search on anything from boat building and book reviews to veterinarians and volleyball. You’ll find me in the Social Media category.
Another very cool thing is Twellowhood. You can use it to zoom in on specific geographical areas and get back the list of everybody in say, Austin, Texas, ranked by number of followers.
You can also search by keyword in Twellow. For example, type in “yoga”, and if “yoga” is in another users name or bio, they’ll be in your search results! If yoga’s your thing, you can follow the people in those search results right there from Twellow by clicking, logging in, and creating a profile –you even get to self-select the categories in which you want to found!
People want valuable connections with people who have similar interests and concerns. Twellowhood makes finding one another a lot easier. You’re ready to start following people with matching interests and almost immediately the majority will follow you back! That’s when it’s time to start discussing the tools for managing and categorizing your followers. Coming soon… the Tweetdeck and Peoplebrowsr lowdown!
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