Twitter From Dummies

D. Sullivan
As the founder of a socially oriented, mobile based startup I get a handful of questions every week about how I feel about Twitter (conflicted), if Appswell is active on twitter (yes, @appswell), and especially, how we’re navigating and are we planning on doing more with it. And yes, before someone beats me to it in the messageboards, I’m aware there’s a definite geek factor at play in my social circles that I have a few opportunities to discuss this every week.

I also read, or am recommended to read articles by apparent brilliant twitteratti on what they’re doing, and 8 tips, or 11 tips, or 5 great secrets, or 6 big no-no’s that are going to define my success on Twitter. These articles are, I’m assured, dumbed down enough for me to grok, in the popular “For Dummies (by smart people)” parleance. I’m certain that a percentage of these people know what they’re doing, and they’re advice should likely be followed. If you are one of those people, prepare to be underwhelmed, and if you’re looking for that sage experience, I’d recommend going elsewhere. I’m not one of those guys.

I’m someone who thinks Twitter might be a useful tool for my business, I don’t have more than an hour or two to spend on it a week, I started out a little blindly, and feel like I’ve gotten a bit better at it over the past six months. I’ve occasionally found that, when starting something, insight from someone who’s taken a few decent steps is more valuable to starting myself than the knowledge of someone who’s gone miles down the path.

I think most of it comes down to brevity and tools.
Brevity. For a medium so devote to brevity, it’s amazing how longwinded some people are, how many tweets there are discussing all possible aspects of tweeting (btw, this may be longwinded, but it’s a blog entry). This carries over to people’s objectives when they first start using twitter; I want to connect to all the right people, I want to grow my userbase, I want to have Oprah retweet me, I want to get 50 new followers a week. As a business, if you just wander in to Twitter, you’re likely to fall into the trap of following vanity milestones rather than business goals, or, be your typical 4 follows, 3 tweets abandoned account.

Figure out three things that would be helpful to your business that you think you might get off twitter, for example, monitoring trends in your brand or industry, keeping up on the competition, or try to identify some possible hires. It is a ‘social’ network, so don’t be a shill, be genuine and engaging, but know what you want to get out of it.

Tools. Twitter is a cluttered place, and it’s easy to lose the forest through a few vocal trees in front of you. You need tools. Probably a few different ones depending on your needs, but don’t go overboard. I struggled at finding the good ones for a few months, but almost all of them are now aggregated at www.oneforty.com (the App store for Twitter), and peer reviewed, and ranked by popularity. It’s where I found Tweetdeck, which is my usual window to the twitter world (I will not use the term ‘twitterverse’) Oneforty has a business section too, which is a good place to uncover some new tools, but don’t go overboard, and have a 15 app dashboard every time you want to log-in. Define your objectives, work with the best tools that you think explicitly solves those issues. If you really get to churning along, and feel like your time on Twitter has been valuable from using Twitter, I try asking the smartest people I know if they’re getting any new value from Twitter that they weren’t three months ago, or I check in to see if there are any breakout new apps that are distinctly different in what they provide.

So start small and don’t go overboard, there are a lot of false positives that feel like benefit but are often just ego stroking, know what you want to get out of it, be disciplined on measuring if you are, don’t be a schmuck once you’re on there, and find the right tool for the right job.

Hope someone finds it helpful, and interested if my experience as a relative newbie business user jives with anyone else’s.