Below is a listing of our top 10 favorite Twitter tips and tricks.
These tips help make your Twitter experience more enjoyable and can help increase your followers.
Customize
- Change your profile picture. Use a picture of yourself to make it seem more personalized if this is your personal Twitter account.
- Utilize as much of the 160-character limit Twitter BIO space allows.
- Include keywords your followers or potential followers may be trying to find.
- Create a background image. However, do not make the image too much like an ad or sales pitch.
- The background image must be less than 800 k and we recommend a size of 1600x1200 for a large image or smaller if you plan on tiling the image or just having it on the left-hand side.
- Finally, keep in mind that smaller resolutions and monitor sizes hide much of the background.
Take advantage of the hundreds of different third-party online tools and services that enhance your Twitter experience. Below are a few of our favorites.
Manageflitter - Fantastic site for managing your followers and getting an overview of people not following you back, quiet users, and inactive users.
SocialOomph - Another great service with a collection of free Twitter tools including the ability to schedule when tweets gets posted.
Twitter Fan Wiki Apps - Finally, this wiki has a listing of several hundred different Twitter applications and tools for users wanting more.
Use Twitter search
Take full advantage of the Twitter search tool. Below are just a few tips that can help improve your search capabilities on Twitter.
Search for your website or blog URL and see if others are mentioning your page.
Search for anything near you by adding near:"city state".
For example, typing near:"Salt lake city Utah" club would return current tweets that have happened in Salt Lake City, Utah with the keyword club in them.
Find people whom you may enjoy following by searching for keywords that interested you.
If you do not want tweets with links add ? -filter:links at the end of your search query.
Need more options, use the Advanced Twitter search.
Any time you get excellent results, click the "Save this search" button to save them.
For those with the old Twitter interface, these results can then be found under "Saved Searches" on the right-hand part of your profile.
For those with the new interface, they are under the "Searches" tab next to your timeline.
Followers
- Twitter is not all about who can get the most followers. But there are many tips you can do to help get more followers and keep the followers you already have.
- Engage followers.
- Do not follow too many people. No one wants to follow someone following thousands of people with only 10 followers.
- Retweet interesting posts.
- Retweet and participate in conversations with people with lots of followers.
- Realize it is impossible for anyone to read every tweet.
- When first joining do not follow hundreds of people, doing this may mark you as a bot.
Create useful and interesting tweets
- Try to make all your tweets informative, useful, or funny.
- Do not post mundane posts, e.g. eating a bowl of cereal.
- Add hashtags to your tweets. For example, if your tweet is about computers, consider adding #computer in the tweet.
- Tweet frequently. No one is going to follow someone they do not know who has not tweeted in months. Try to tweet a few times a week or daily if you can manage.
- Do not whine or complain. Most people unfollow anyone who constantly whines or complains.
- Try to make your valuable tweets during the times people will most likely see them.
- Keep some space available in your tweet in case someone retweets your post.
- Use special characters in your tweets.
Know the lingo
Know the Twitter lingo, these are just a few examples: @reply, Direct Message (DM), follower, hashtag, retweet (RT), trending topics, and tweet. See the Twitter description for a complete listing of Twitter terms and lingo and related terms.
Follow the masters
Following a few of the masters of Twitter and Social Networking give you an understanding of how to tweet better, posts to RT, and can provide inspiration for your tweets. Below are the top ten Twitters we recommend following.
@GuyKawasaki
@Scobleizer
@jeffbullas
@briansolis
@tonyrobbins
@timoreilly
@donttrythis
@zappos
@brainpicker
@savedyouaclick
Create and use lists
Twitter lists are an excellent method of filtering filter through the people you follow. To create a list, click your Twitter profile icon on the computer or the gear icon on your phone and then click Lists. Once in Lists, click Create new list on a computer or the + icon on the phone. After creating a list, visit the Twitter page you want to add and on a PC click the three dots for More user actions or the gear icon on the phone and then click Add or remove from lists.
Go Mobile
Apple iPhones, BlackBerry phones, Android phones, Windows phone 7 phones, and most of the other smartphones have Twitter applications. Take full
advantage of these applications.
For users who do not have smartphones Twitter also has extensive support for SMS, which can send tweets over a text message.
Advertise
Mention your Twitter page as many places as you can, e.g. your business card, e-mail signatures, web page, blog, and on Facebook.
Create a tweet button or at least your Twitter name on your pages, similar to the examples below.
Posts
