Blog Post: Going Beyond the One Way Street: How To Effectively Use Twitter

There’s a lot of ideas out there on how to best use Twitter on behalf of an organization. I’ve seen lots of companies (including our own) utilize Twitter to push the messages they want out to their ‘followers.’ Well guess what? Twitter is not a one way street.

To effectively ‘be’ on Twitter, you have to view Twitter as a chat room, email system, and an RSS feed…in that order. Twitter is about developing relationships, massaging egos, and occasionally getting across what you want to communicate. The rest of this blog post teaches you how to develop relationships and massage egos since we’re all so good accomplishing the latter point, which is talking about ourselves.

There’s some Twitter lingo I want to teach new Twitterers out there who are just venturing into the space. It looks a little something like this: @, D, RT, & the follow button. That’s what we’re touching on in this post.

Developing Relationships

@- This symbol is how you get people’s attention on Twitter. It’s how you reply to someone. You simply put the ‘@’ symbol into the big box that says ‘What are you doing?’, followed by the username you’d like to reply to, and then the message. It looks something like this:

I’d say that 3 out of every 4 tweets should be an @ reply. Here’s three uses for @replies:

1)  Publicly comment on someone’s status update.  This is great to let clients, partners (or potential clients and partners) know that you read what they wrote, cared about what they wrote, and took the time to write back.  It’s the same thinking as commenting on a blog. It’s especially important that you do this because companies are paying as close attention to Twitter activity now than they ever will be.  It’s a fantastic window of opportunity to develop relationships.

2)  To reach out to people that aren’t readily accessible.  By including the @username, you can immediately reach out to decision makers, authors, or whoever you want to network with.  A great way to do this is by forming a cool list (See 10 Authors a Job Seeker Should Follow, or List of CEO’s on Twitter) and then using the @replies to let them know they’ve been included.

3)  To thank people for Retweeting what you said (RT’s are explained later)

There’s one thing to note with the @replies.  They’re public.  So whatever you say will appear to everyone following you, and will live on your stream of updates.  If you’d like to send a message that’s private, then you’ll have to send a DM- a direct message.

D- This symbol is how you send a direct message.  The one thing with direct messages is that the person you want to send a direct message to has to be following you in order for you to send.  Otherwise, you’ll have to send an @reply mentioned above.     

Here’s how it looks for a direct message:

You would direct message someone when you don’t want anyone to see what you’re saying.  

Massaging Egos  

RT- RT stands for ‘retweet.’ It’s the best way to massage an ego on Twitter.  A retweet is like a bibliography- you cite the source along with what was said and include the letters RT at the very beginning of the sentence.

It looks something like this:

A retweet is about as flattering as it gets on Twitter. It lets the person being retweeted know that what they said is something that you found to valuable enough to share with all of your followers.  People appreciate that, especially when the person being retweeted is trying to spread the word about something.  

The only way you could retweet something is by being active on Twitter.  You actually have to pay attention to what people are saying.  Two appropriate things to RT:

1)  A useful link with a story, informative blog post, or other piece of valuable information.

2)  Big news.  Marriage, babies, deaths, business accomplishments, awards, etc.

Following- The last thing I want to talk about is following someone on Twitter.  If you’re familiar with Facebook, following someone on Twitter is like poking them on Facebook.  It’s letting the person you’re following know that you’re paying attention to them, and that you’d like to be paid attention to as well.  In addition, following someone lets you see everything that person is saying as they say it.

It’s very smart to follow clients, competitors, employees, partners, as well as potential clients, partners, and employees.  A couple ways for you to find people:

1)  Use the “Find People” button on Twitter and type in the name of the organization or person you’re looking for.

2)  Use Twitter Search and type in the name of the organization or person you’re looking for.  Oftentimes, this option is more successful.  

If you follow people and pay attention to what is being said in the Twittersphere by using RT’s, @’s, and D’s, there’s a good chance you can use Twitter for something more than another RSS feed.  You can make Twitter a two way street.

Brett Farmiloe is a Social Media Manager at Jobing.com.  He tweets under the username @thatpassionguy.  He and @zachhubbell frequently speak about social media and consult with partners of Jobing.com about social media strategies.