Guide to Starting Twitter

This first post is for my mom (@katehedges). She just joined twitter and I thought I would write a guide for her (that perhaps) would be of interest to other people new to twitter as well. Eventually this space will be filled with long-form awesomeness that doesn't fit into twitter's 140-character limit. Here are the steps that I followed in order to unlock the value of twitter:

1. Use twitter search (http://search.twitter.com/) to find a few people who are posting comments on topics that are of interest to you. When you find a tweet (stupid name for posts but stick with me) click on the hyperlink to the user’s profile. The bio section (upper right-hand corner) should give a general sense of what brand they want to communicate. Look at the history of their comments to confirm their story. Also click on the link to the user’s blog (above the bio field where relevant); this can be another great way to understand what topics they are experts on. At this stage the more people you follow the better, it's easy enough to delete them after you have achieved critical mass and you want to cull the herd. To follow someone click the “follow” link below his or her name.

Use this first group of people as conduits into the communities they already belong to. I would imagine for you travel would be a key topic (I don't follow them but soultravelers3 might be of interest to you). Also key words like London, culinary, Chelsea might be good search terms. Find 10-15 people through this process to follow. As you start to follow these users you will receive a stream of tweets that you can check once or twice a day. These tweets should supply you with a steady source of interesting articles, provocative statements, etc. If your feed doesn’t contain the right content go back to the search function to find new seeds (bloggers you already read might also provide a good starting source).

2. Once you have collected a group of seeds see whom these users are having conversations with (look for an @ sign before a name, that indicates that your first user is having a public conversation with another user). Also look at your seed users’ followers and who is following them (upper right-hand corner again). Anyone with above 2,000 users is probably pretty mainstream and has been vetted by the community. Look for both the power-users and people who you stumble upon (users with 50-500 follower who aren’t looking for mass market adoption but probably have some interesting ideas). By this point you should have 40-50 users and a pretty good flow of articles and commentary. Ideally some of these people have reciprocated your following of them and you might even have a little audience of people following you. Post links to your blog and whatever else you deem interesting.

3. Finally by this point you have created a significant sample size for a service to make recommendations on people you should follow but aren’t. The service I use to serve this function is MrTweet. MrTweet is a twitter service (follow the “MrTweet” account just as you would another user) that compares who you follow to the universe of people on twitter and recommends individuals to follow based on the network of people you follow already. The service will send you a report after two weeks sharing information regarding new users that are influential in your community that you might have missed during the random search process. Adding these users (plus the continual exploration of followers and following among your existing seeds) should get you a nice 100+ feed of people.

Following these steps will lead to a customized news feed of content of interest to you (I’m moving towards getting much of my daily news through twitter alone with a once a day check of my favored websites). This feed can be inspiration as you decide what voice you want to project onto the twitter community. As you contribute your thoughts and original material to the community there should be a slow increase in the number of users who follow you. Unfortunately, other than the off chance that you are already a celebrity (if so congratulations), there doesn’t seem to be a way to accelerate the process of gaining users beyond providing good content to the community. Perhaps in a future post I will take a stab at follower accruing tactics …

PS. Mom pardon any spelling, grammar, editing problems. You raised me better but I’m writing this in my free time and as such I am beyond the point of proofreading.