How to Become a Twitter Expert

Is Twitter Worth Your Time?

Gini Dietrich, who owns a social media marketing business, tweets 200 times a day. I’m not kidding.

She schedules one tweet an hour between 8am and 6pm, then retweets and sends direct messages throughout the day to her 18,000 followers. In the last four years, she has sent out 64,000 tweets.

I’ve been thinking about that as I contemplate whether I can overcome my basic dislike of Twitter. It’s my least favorite social media platform. Messages, with all those “@” and “#” signs, are, at best, just fragments of conversations. But in my quest to “get social,” I’ve decided to spend more time with the bird and see what happens.

I know the basics. I schedule tweets in advance on Hootsuite and share information I find useful. I know if I type @chrisruyspr in the search box, I can find out who’s retweeted my tweets. I also know about trend words. I use Twilert to receive Twitter mentions of “public relations” and “social media.” I learn from these tweets and share some of them with my followers. I use Twellow – Twitter’s yellow pages – to more easily find people I want to follow (and who hopefully will follow me back).

Is Twitter a Waste of Time?

Dona Collins, in a blog post called “Is Twitter a Waste of Time?,” threw out some interesting stats the other day. Only 16 percent of active online users use Twitter. More females than males use it, and 45 percent are between 18 and 34. Only 5 percent have more than 50 followers.

Most shocking: 25 percent of Twitter users have no followers. At all! And 40 percent of users don’t publish anything. Ever!

Ms. Collins wrote about the benefits like having a presence on a site with 200 million users, and the ability to learn and widen your network. You can blatantly sell your products and services. And it’s convenient for people on the go, who can download the Twitter app to their smart phone, and read and send messages wherever they are.

Ms. Collins offered some great advice. Twitter shouldn’t be a contest to see how many people you can follow or how many follow you. Twitter messages are archived and searchable forever. And, remember, not everything you read on Twitter is true.

E-mail Notifications Can Now Help You Stay Up-to-date on Twitter.

You can now get Twitter notifications in your inbox.

All you need to do is change your e-mail preferences in the notifications section of your settings page. You can set your e-mail preferences to let you know when: you have a new direct message, you are sent a reply to one of your tweets or are mentioned in a tweet, you are followed by someone new, or someone retweets or favorites one of your tweets.

In its notice announcing the change, Twitter said: “We strive to send emails when they are most applicable to you. For example, if someone you follow retweets your tweet or someone you mention replies to your tweet, we may send you an email. You will not necessarily receive an email for every retweet, reply, or favorite; for now we will only e-mail you when we think it is most relevant. Note that every e-mail contains a link to unsubscribe from that particular type of notification.”

What is your experience with Twitter? Do you like it and use it? Why and how?

Image by Flickr user cambodia4kidsorg.

Tagged as: social media, social media marketing, Twitter, social media for businesses and Hootsuite