Learning Social Media

Twitter has an interesting learning and adoption curve. One of the first things to try to figure out is, “What in the world do I say on here?” Here are 10 things for you to do on Twitter that will hopefully kickstart the process.

1. Say what you’re doing. Maybe its a once in a lifetime even. example
2. Share a photo or set of photos. example
3. Share a recent blog post of yours, or better yet of a friend. example
4. Launch a new product and listen to the conversation around it.
5. Ask a question, and you might just get a fix or answer.
6. Promote an event that you’re attending to find other people going.
7. ReTweet (RT) a Tweet for someone else to spread the message to your network as well as theirs. If you are hoping for someone to retweet a message of yours say, “Please RT:”
8. Share a link to a cool new piece of technology.
9. Tell people how you’re feeling about something. Support comes from the most unlikely places.
10. Use Search to keep an eye on what people are saying about you and your friends.

There you go! These are still very basic intro tips. In the next few days we are going to move into some more advanced concepts and topics of social media.

The Cluetrain Manifesto written in 1999 by Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger, is a set of 95 thesis as a call to action for businesses and people acting in the connected marketplace we have today. It has been cited as a document that’s helped bring many people and businesses into understanding the mentality, mindset, and reality of the market that we live in today and how we should interact in that marketplace.

I’m not going to write more on it, asides to say that to enter this space you should read this text. Read it before you read any more of this website. It isn’t long or difficult to understand. Better yet, if you’d like you can read it online for free. If you’d prefer dead-tree version, they are available at Amazon.

Twitter is a microblogging platform used by millions worldwide to communicate public messages. Messages are constrained to 140 characters, and mostly public. In addition to putting information out to Twitter, you can use it as a research resource to search and keep an eye on what people are saying about you or things you care about. Overall you can do a lot with Twitter, but what you need to do today is sign up. Here’s a short video thanks to Common Craft:

Tasks for Today:

1. Sign up for Twitter.
2. Fill out user profile completely, including adding a photo.
3. Use Twitter’s built-in tool to search through your inbox and find people that you have connected with in the past that are on Twitter. Chances are, there’s someone. “Follow” them. Follow @tibbon to follow me.
4. Put out three Tweets (messages on Twitter). In the first, just say “Hi” and what you’re interested in. In the second, ask a short question as to something that you’ve been trying to figure out. In the third Tweet, tell us what you’re looking forward to in the next week (upcoming movie, job interview, or an event).
5. Search for something you care about on Twitter. Maybe look up a company, a band, recent news, or something you’ve bought recently. See how much conversation there is out there?

Tomorrow and in the future:

• Send out at least one Tweet per day.
• Check out TwitScoop to see what everyone’s talking about.
• Use search to see if people are mentioning you.
• Follow people that follow you. Avoid following spammers.
• Don’t follow too many people. Once you follow more than 100 people, then following more than 10% than follow you looks bad and is a faux pas.
• Look at what others are doing an emulate them. This is a great environment to learn by example.

There’s a lot more to Twitter than just this, but these are things to do today and I will be covering more in the future. If you’re craving information today, Rebecca Corliss at Hubspot has put together an excellent free eBook on Twitter that covers it in-depth.