In my previous post, How to get your most valuable resources engaged in social media, I spoke about the different zones of social media engagement. In this post I wanted to share some hints and tips I provided to people getting going with Twitter, especially in the Content Sharer Zone. These 15 points for the Twitter Beginner can have a major impact and make the use of Twitter more enjoyable and engaging!

1. Get people to sign up for Twitter Analytics (It is free). From the day they sign up it will start providing them feedback on how many people are looking at and interacting with their Tweets. Giving people access to their statistics is very motivating, especially as they try new things, to see what is driving engagement. Point one is encourage people to measure and monitor the effect of what they are doing using the FREE Twitter Analytics.
2. Help people understand how people use Twitter. In short if their tweet has no has (#) tags and no mentions (@) tags then, unless they have ten thousand followers, their tweets are relying on the few people that follow them sharing into their networks to be seen. Point two is therefore encourage people to never tweet without including #tags or @tags until you are a twitter superstar with a million followers at which point they can do what you want :).
3. Get people to understand that selecting the right hash tags will determine how many people see their tweet. For example if they take their hash tag, and then do a quick search on it, then they will see how many Tweets include that tag. Take a look at #Hadoop and you will see there are many tweets. If you then look for #BCBS239, an emerging regulation in Europe, you will see there are very few compared to say #RiskManagement. This means if a Tweet includes both #RiskManagment and #BCBS239 then the chances of it being seen go up a lot. Point three is get people to do a cursory search of the hash tags they intend to use to see if it is in wide use. If not they need to find one that is in wide use unless they want to start your own trend. When searching be sure to tell people to click the ALL hyperlink at the top of the search as it often defaults to TOP which does not show them a good view of activity…
4. Explain to people that to build a growing list of followers they cannot just retweet. Point four is that if all a person ever does is retweet then the people following them may as well follow those who they keep retweeting. If people are going to retweet then they should always add a few words especially if they want it to help them build followers. To do it right they need to copy the original tweet – so if I posted “a few steps for getting going with Twitter” – you copy it and put your few words in front and then add “RT : @Mark_Torr:”.  So for example that new tweet would look like this  “Great Tips RT : @Mark_Torr a few steps for getting going with Twitter”.  It is courteous to acknowledge the original source when you retweet. Point five is that people should recognize others so they will do it back to them!
5. Have people spend time to learn some of the Twitter Acronyms. Then they can go beyond RT to MT and onto PRT and FF. Point Six is to encourage people to get hip and learn the lingo
6. This one is perhaps controversial :). If all someone ever posts are things from your company they can be replaced by the standard corporate channels. What I encourage people to do is to spend time deciding what topics they want to engage into and finding the people/media outlets pushing out most content around that. For me this includes #IoT #InternetOfThings #BigData #Hadoop plus a whole bunch of news sites and organizations like the World Economic Forum.  From there they can retweet some of that content which they found interesting using all the tips above to build a following of a general nature. Of course when someone then posts things related to their company those who receive them are more disparate. Point Seven is that people need to reach outside their corporate circles if they want to expand their reach. That takes time.
7. Encourage people to follow their competitors. I suggest people follow their competitors so that all their corporate information comes to their feed.  Essentially it is one stop shop on what they are doing and saying. Point Eight is to encourage people to use Twitter as a data source not just as a broadcast channel. Of course they can also do the same to find out about potential customers, partners or suppliers (follow them, search for their @ or # tag handles to see what they are positing) before they meet them.
8. People will be very pleased when their numbers of followers, retweets and favourites start to grow significantly. That is until they realize some of that is coming from people who clearly are not their target audience (bots, strange accounts etc). It turns out this is pretty normal. The hope from those folks is that by following people they will in turn get more followers back. The issue is people will struggle to know how many real followers they have and if someone takes a look through their follower list they are not likely going to take them very seriously if 50% of the followers are a bit strange (I will leave you to define what strange is).  As a result I suggested to people that they block such users (Learn more from Twitter here). The approach I gave to people was to closely monitor their notifications to see if activity seems legitimate. If not they can click on the photo (for new followers) or the names for favourites and/or retweets to go to the profile of the person involved from where they can block them. Once blocked if they return to their notifications tab and refresh the page their activity will be removed. Point Nine – Blocking non-relevant followers allows people to know where they are with real activity and their real target group – quality for me is better than quantity.
9. Explain to people that starting a tweet with and @Username results in that tweet being treated as a reply meaning that it will only be seen by the person they replied to and the  people who are following both of you. Nobody else will see it in their stream (although it will show up on your profile page and in Twitter search). To ensure that the tweet is visible to all, if that is your intention, start your tweet with something else or simply put a “.” in front of the user name so it looks like this .@Username. Then everybody following the tweeting individual will see that message. Point Ten – Have people understand that starting tweets with any sort of @username might not have such a braod reach.
10. Encourage people to try keeping tweets short — 100 characters instead of 140 — as this lets others add their own commentary when retweeting. If not they have to edit tweets before retweeting and this extra step could prevent it happening. Point Eleven – Have people consider the length of their tweets if they want to encourage retweets with commentary.
11. Getting people to add an image to their tweet is a clever way to get around the 140 character limit and drive more engagement as an image can contain a lot more information.  Learn more from Twitter here. In adding images please ensure you are not breaking any copyright laws. If unsure read this article. Point Twelve – consider the use of images to get more Tweet engagement.
12. Explain to people that posting, OCCASIONALLY, the same content differently 3 or 4 times a day helps them to cover all time zones and be seen on busy Twitter news feeds. Point Thirteen– Have people think about the time zone and repeat certain Tweets to increase engagement
13. Point Fourteen – Simple – Get people to use a professional profile picture if they want to appear professional.  
14. I mentioned the importance of Hashtags in point 7. Besides searching it is possible to research the Hashtags people might want to use via this pretty  cool web site. I do encourage people to keep the number of hashtags to 3 at the maximum as otherwise reading tweets becomes difficult. Point Fifteen – Show people how to research hashtags and have them be careful with how many hash tags they use. It is my belief people should rarely tweet something without at least one hash tag.

These are some of the core starter tips I give to new Twitter users (in no specific order). Do you have others?