How To Tweet Properly: Ten Top Tips to Being a Tip Top Tweeter
I’ve been on Twitter for just over two years now and, while I couldn’t recommend the service enough this time last year, recently I’ve begun to find it becoming a bit stale. In fact, I’ve become a bit of a ‘selfish’ user: whereas before I would vigorously read through my entire timeline on a regular basis, I find myself less enthusiastic about doing so, only posting my thoughts and responding to tweets I receive about them. I’m making fewer friends through the service, opportunities to develop myself are becoming scarcer and generally just find it a tad boring these days.This may be down to the fact that I’ve just become used to the service, but it’s also down to some observations I’ve made about other users: some people just don’t seem to know how to use Twitter properly.
By following these tips, you can help the site remain a friendly, useful and fun place.
1. Talk to other people, not just the ones you know. It’s all well and good following and chatting with your pals on Twitter, but why bother when you can contact them via phone, instant messenger or Facebook instead? It also gets boring when you see the same old names pop up in your mentions stream time and time again, commenting on every single tweet you make. Give your timeline some variety by adding a greater range of people to it: follow friends of friends, see who’s tweeting what about trending topics and look up people relevant to your interests on one of many Twitter directory services. Hell, even follow people in a field you don’t think interests you: variety is the spice of life after all and you may be pleasantly surprised.
2. Make a good profile biography and image. Your picture and short description of yourself are usually the first thing potential followers will see, so it’s wise to make both as interesting as possible in order to gain that valuable click on your ‘follow’ button. With only 160 characters, it’s not difficult to come up with a good one: state your hobbies, favourite films, bands, TV shows, locations, what makes you laugh, cry, your pets: put anything you think will give across your personality as succinctly as possible. As for your image, it’s preferable to upload a photo of yourself, but cartoon avatars and the ilk are fine too. Hell, upload anything other than the default Twitter image: failing to do so gives across the idea that you’re lazy. If someone comes across your profile and sees a blank bio and default image, there’s nothing to distinguish you from the countless other soulless profiles littering the service.
No.
3. Don’t tweet without responding to your mentions. It’s good to contribute your thoughts and feelings to the ether, but it goes both ways: you need to listen and talk to others if you want the same to happen for you. You don’t have to respond to every mention you get, but if you consistently ignore someone over and over again, it’s only a matter of time before they give up and unfollow you. It’s understandable for celebrities and people with large follower counts purely because of the amount of tweets they must receive, but there has been the odd person with follower counts similar to mine that didn’t respond to anything I tweeted to them. It’s irritating, insulting and likely to result in you losing a follower. With no-one to listen to you, you may as well be shouting your thoughts to an empty room. What’s the point in following someone if it doesn’t benefit you in any way?Institute a ’three strikes and you’re unfollowed’ rule to new people you’re following and give up completely if you receive a response asking ‘who are you?’ or saying ‘I don’t know you’: people that respond with this have missed the point of the service completely.
And don’t post one-word responses. Those are just annoying.
4. Don’t be afraid to follow people. The entire point of Twitter is to get to know more people and the first step in doing so is to follow others, so if someone has piqued your interest with their bio (and perhaps their pic), don’t feel intimidated by them: give them a follow and see how it goes. At best you’ve made a new friend and at worst you can always unfollow them later on.
5. Follow a good mix of tweeters. It’s fine to follow your favourite celebrities and inspirational figures, but don’t forget to follow regular folk as well: just because they’re not famous doesn’t mean their tweets won’t be any less eye-opening or profound. In fact, you may find them more inspirational than any well-known figure’s can ever be. Subscribe to a range of people, organisations, news sites, comedy sites (such as the chuckle-inducing Big Ben Clock and simply brilliant Sexy Executive feeds) and also JEDWARD, if you dare…
Their tweets are simply astounding...
6. Don’t be afraid to comment on other peoples’ tweets. Twitter thrives on sparking up conversation between others, so if someone posts a tweet that you have a say on, type it up and send it their way. You have an infinitely greater chance of sparking up a conversation about something than if you didn’t. It also adds to your all-important tweet count.
7. Don’t use your feed solely to advertise your wares. It’s all well and good to follow the streams of your favourite news sites and organisations, but when it comes to following an individual, people want to feel like they’re following exactly that: a person. It’s fine to post achievements and articles of work you’re proud of, but it’s easy for your followers to get fed up when they’re the only thing you post. If you perpetually submit link after link after link, you become no better than those aggravating spambots. Insert a little heart, heart and soul into your tweets every so often to remind your followers that you’re human too.
8. Don’t unfollow someone just because you don’t agree with them. If someone posts something you don’t agree with, don’t immediately remove them from your feed: call them out and challenge them on it. Alongside discussion, Twitter also thrives on debate. I have a regular political sparring partner on my feed and the points and rebuttals he sends me opens my eyes to how others feel about the world around them and of points and issues I may not have noticed before, as I hope mine do for him. Only apply this step to a reasonable degree, though: if someone posts something hateful, abusive or inflammatory, they more than likely deserve a lower follower count as a result.
9. Don’t sign up to a million auto-tweet services. I don’t mind seeing the occasional tweet about which musical artists you listened to the most that week, but when I see constant updates about which games you’re playing, which films you’re renting/watching, which public location you’re currently in and so on, I seriously decide whether to keep following the offending tweeter or not. Only sign up to services you really care about and choose when to post tweets yourself to stop your feed from becoming a spamalanche.
I looked up spamalanche and this is what came up.
10. Don’t enter every bloody Twitter competition you can. Speaking of spamalanches, there’s a relatively recent phenomenon that’s been rearing its ugly head more frequently these days: the ‘RT and follow’ competition. Twitter’s a fantastic medium in which to hold a competition and give away prizes, but whenever I see that phrase contained within a tweet, I immediately disregard it. It’s a cheap, lazy and under-handed way to artificially inflate follower numbers and on the rare occasion that I partake in such a competition, I make sure to unfollow the organisers as soon as it’s over on matter of principle. Such competitions also regularly result in a flood of spam that I’m not interested in reading. If I see a feed that contains excessive amounts of these kinds of tweets, it usually results in an instant unfollow.
Twitter is a social network, one designed to propagate and develop personal and professional relationships between people, but some just don’t seem realise that, instead tweeting blindly and not making the most of using the service properly. If users remembered these guidelines, it would be a much better place to inhabit.
Addendum: 5th May 2011: After publishing this, I’ve noticed a few more annoying things people do on Twitter and so added a couple more points to this list.
11. Don’t follow someone and expect them to immediately follow you back. Twitter is not about following massive amounts of people and expecting to gain a huge number of followers in return: it’s about connecting with people on a personal level and forming meaningful bonds and connections with them. You’re not doing this if you follow someone purely to get your follower numbers up. This practice, known as ‘follow-boosting’, is not only highly-irritating, but it rarely works in your favour. Your vast following counter may be a deterrent to people following you back: if you’re following 30,000+ people, they might feel that you’ll never even see their tweets, let alone read them. Fair enough, unfollow someone if you never really spoke to them or lost interest them, but don’t do so purely on the fact that they didn’t follow you back because you followed them. Gain their trust and friendship and they’ll follow you back in due course. Remember, you’re under no obligation to follow anybody on Twitter, so don’t feel pressured into doing so. The loss of a follower that never spoke to them after a few days won’t mean much to them at all. If you follow then unfollow me after a short period of time, you can rest assured that I won’t be using your business/visiting your website or recommending your services to anyone.
And don’t be one of those people that constantly follows and unfollows the same person over and over again: if you do so, you are the height of annoying.
12. Don’t spam your feed with overused memes, Twitter games and old news. It’s good to hop onto Twitter and spot a tweet about an interesting news story or a funny joke you may not have heard before, but there’s nothing more exasperating than logging onto the service only to find everybody saying the exact same thing. The days where my feed was filled with posts consisting of ‘WINNING’, rubbish about the royal wedding and ‘Osama’s dead’ were ones I could seriously have done without. Think about it: if you hear about a news story that’s relevant to the entire world, someone will have likely already broken the story and everybody will already know: do you really need to play follow the leader and tweet the exact same thing.
As for forum games, they can be fun, but only in small amounts. Post a couple of contributions, but don’t go overboard: people will get sick of the flood of tweets you’re posting and ignore them. You’re supposed to tweeting only your funniest submissions, not going through entire scripts of movies or whatever looking to see if your changes make sense or not. Keep forum games fun, not spammy.
Life Lessons, or Eight Steps to Living a More Regret-Free Life
If only we could all say the same.
We all have regrets: those moments in our past we can pinpoint exactly where we wish we had an opportunity to travel back to and alter for the better. They take a number of different forms, be they large – the exact moment where you realised you hadn’t acted quickly enough with someone you liked and lost your chance with them forever – or something near inconsequential – wishing you hadn’t had those profiteroles after a hefty dinner – but their results nearly always keep on stinging long after the actual event has happened.
It’s impossible to exist without encountering situations where we regret our actions (or inactions) and while painful, they are essential to us: the consequences of such events shape us, moulding our outlooks, thoughts and behaviour for the rest of our lives. Knowing this, though, doesn’t make it any easier for us to accept them or the fact that we will inevitably suffer more in the future (hell, I’ve added two to my list of regrets in the last three months alone), but here are some lessons I’ve learned about life that will hopefully bring some emotional comfort and help you reduce the number of regrets you have over the course of your life.
1. Commit to things and do them, even if you waiver in your conviction. If you’re having trouble coming to a decision about something important, weigh up the benefits and disadvantages of each choice thoroughly and decide which seems best to you. Choose the best course of action and stick with it. Keep to that decision, even if you begin to have doubts over whether you’ve made the correct choice or not: it’s much easier to get something done and achieve your goals without the crippling doubt that can accompany you second-guessing your initial decision. Pussy-footing about has been the creator of a large number of regrets I don’t want to begin counting.
2. Always give people the benefit of the doubt, or at least if they haven’t wronged you before. It’s always disappointing when someone lets you down, but there may have been mitigating circumstances that prevented them from meeting the goals and objectives you had mutually arranged. Remember the next time that someone lets you down that they may be battling a traumatic event that is drastically hindering their ability to cope with their obligations and responsibilities. As such, you should award them a degree of leniency, especially if they have shone in the past. If they’re a repeat offender, however, all bets are off: they’ve shown themselves to be consistently unreliable, making it an unchangeable part of their nature and will only keep on letting you down in the future.
3. Don’t change for someone if they’re not going to change for you. Human relationships are mind-bogglingly complex, but people boil down to being akin to ingredients in a recipe: some will complement each other perfectly, others will get there with a little work and the majority just won’t mix at all. Every relationship requires compromise from both parties: it’s not fair for one person to constantly bend to the will and whims of the other. It’s admirable to change aspects of yourself in order to gel better with another person, but it’s a two-way street: they must be willing to do the same for you. If you feel you’re trying too hard with someone that isn’t reciprocating, you may simply not be right for each other. Forget about it and move on: there are plenty of other people that you would be more compatible with and vice versa.
4. Live in the moment, not the past or future. It’s all well and good wallowing in your past and worrying about what lies up ahead, but we exist in the present and that’s what we should focus on. The past is important in shaping us and the future is essential to focusing our goals, but don’t flounder in the former and worry about the latter: live in the here-and-now.
5. Value your true friends. These are the people that will stick with you through the good and bad; the ones that will stand by your side, who will never be bored or fed up with what you say and enjoy your company no matter how you feel. They are your best tools for overcoming any regrets, worries or problems you may have. Disregard things that you see on social networking sites: it’s all well and good seeing how many friends you have online, but the true ones are those you spend the most time around, that you can talk to about anything and who genuinely care about you, qualities that can’t be shown by arbitrary numbers on any website. Remember that fake friends are like shadows: they’re with you during your brightest hours, but nowhere to be seen in your darkest.
6. Don’t worry about things too much. Rarely does anything in this life require as much worry as we assign to it, no matter how much importance and significance we place on it. Yes, some things require more attention than others, but a plethora of resources and facilities exist to deal with these worries before they get out of control. Things could be worse and even then, nothing we ever do will matter in the grand scheme of things. After all, as a friend once told me, we’re just insignificant specks on a ball of rock hurling through space that will consumed by the sun at some point anyway. Take from that what comfort you will.
7. Things will get better. No matter how bad you feel, either physically or mentally, and no matter how long it takes, be it a few hours, days, months or even years, things will eventually begin to look up. The wheel of life is constantly turning, with good times following the bad following the good following the bad for eternity. When you’re down, weather the storm and come out the other side knowing that things are set to improve. When you’re at your lowest, be thankful that things can’t get any worse and that they can only get better.
8. Just go for it. If you really want something, then work your hardest at obtaining it. Nobody can ever define your limitations: the only person who can do that is yourself. Whether you want to succeed academically, attend an event when you’re not feeling your best or a whole host of other situations life presents you with, grab the opportunity with both hands. Even if you fail, you’ll know you’ll have taken your best shot at it. What would you rather do: mourn an opportunity you let go by you or be able to say you gave it a go anyway?
We all suffer setbacks and it can be difficult to maintain a positive outlook on life occasionally (even I have difficulties following these tips sometimes), but I hope these mantra help to make it that little bit more manageable. They’re from the heart and I hope they aid you through your day.
And if all else fails, just think of stupid sexy Flanders. That should cheer you in no time at all.
In no time at all. In no time at all. In no time at all...
