Sometimes in life, we figure something out without realizing it. Then we go through a phase where we think, “Oh, hey, that’s accomplishing this thing over here. Wow, neat.” Then we realize that actually, this could be super helpful to lots of other people.
It is this exact scenario that leads me to our engagement post for today. My great Twitter secret. The thing that, in my opinion, helps me enjoy Twitter, helps me engage better, and helps me get the most out of any time that I spend using Twitter. Are you ready?
Live on your @ page or your @ column.
That’s it. That’s my single best piece of advice if you are new to Twitter or if you are struggling.
Doesn’t sound very ground-breaking, does it? But here’s why it works.
• People don’t think you’re a jerk for not responding, because you’re always responding. Or pretty much always.
• In a chat, you are able to converse with people in the mass chaos happening around you because you see the replies that are sent your way.
• If you hit your replies first, you guarantee that you’re responding to other people before blasting your stream with self-promotion.
• You have a better chance of seeing RTs and mentions faster which means you can thank people faster (people like that).
• You aren’t as bothered about whether so and so or whoisit is paying attention to you, because your focus is on the people who ARE paying attention to you, and that’s where your emphasis should be anyway.
So what does this mean?
It means when you sign into Twitter, the first thing you check is wherever your mentions are. Take care of those first. If you only have five minutes, take care of the oldest ones first. That’s how you can handle some of the time management issues without making people upset.
It means that if you don’t have a lot of replies coming your way, you may need to go and feed other people replies so that they want to talk back to you. If I sign into Twitter and no one is really talking to me, I automatically assume I’m not doing a good enough job of engaging with other people.
It means that in a chat, you may not even be aware that a big name has popped in because you are focusing on the little conversations you are carving out with other people.
It also keeps your focus on engaging with others more than promoting yourself.
It’s no great mystery
People often comment that it seems like whenever they mention me, I pop up. That’s not an accident. When I say I’m checking into Twitter, what I really mean is that I’m checking to see if anyone is conversing with me, and then I’m going to converse with and/or promote other people.
That’s all there is to it.
Try it out, or let me know if you have already adopted this Twitter methodology. Does it work for you? Let’s talk about it!
This is post #44 in the Engagement Series. We are almost halfway through already. Hard to believe!
Image by Ádám Bálint. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/catchke2ro
Thanks, that makes sense!
I sure enjoy reading your posts about engagement, your ideas come through very clear. I can tell I haven’t caught on to the mechanics of this yet, so I’ll just ask.
What does taking care of a mention mean?
How do I feed other people replies?
Hi Steve,
By “taking care of replies” I mean responding back.. By “feeding other people replies,” I mean looking for someone who’s asking a question, or someone who has a blog post that interests you. Or maybe you just say hi to someone you haven’t talked to in awhile. If you talk to them they are more likely to respond.
Does that help?
OK, I guess that isn’t too mysterious. Thanks for answering I’ll try that.
Hi Margie! I love this! I wish I could get EVERYONE to follow this advice. There is nothing more frustrating than trying to genuinely engage and people don’t @ reply back. I love @ replies. I fear that it makes my twitter stream look noisy to those who don’t understand that only mutual follows can really “see” a conversation, but that is not enough to keep me from @-replying like crazy.
I follow back about 70% of everyone who follows me, but I am MOST reluctant to follow back those who have zero @ replies in their stream, and rather have just tweeted repeatedly about any old thing with no conversation. (Even worse is an entire stream of 4 square check ins – I really don’t object to 4 Square check ins, just don’t think a whole stream should be that.)
~Melody