Following Twitter etiquette and showing good social networking manners is not hard to do. Here are six steps to stay on the good side of other social networking and not become an online clod.
- Use @ replies: When mentioning another Twitter account, use the @username to let them know you made a comment. Without the “@”, the account you are mentioning will not likely see your tweet.
- Retweeting: Share others messages by retweeting or rebroadcasting tweets to your followers. If a message exceeds the 140 character restriction, it is OK to trim or modify the message to fit. Be sure to keep the original message intent.
- Be interesting: Include a variety of content in your Twitter tweets. A stream of pure sales messages will likely turn off followers. Post pictures of interesting sites, links to industry news articles or just plain old fun comments. Be personable.
- Follow back: With Twitter, it is a good practice to follow those who follow you. Twitter restricts the number of accounts you can follow based on the number of Twitter accounts following you. Once you follow 2,000 accounts, Twitter will not allow you to add new accounts to your following until you either unfollow some or others begin following you. If you do not follow back, you will find many accounts will unfollow you.
- Stop the auto messages: Don’t set up messages to automatically send a response when an new Twitter account follows you. I recently received a direct message from someone I followed saying. “Thanks for following me. I look forward to reading your tweets.” This was a meaningless message to be because this account did not follow me back. They never did see any of my tweets. The message was meaningless and cluttered up my messages pages.
By following these six social networking tips you can navigate Twitter and use tweets for business while using social networking with etiquette and good manners.
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