There’s plenty of information out there on how to use Twitter, but I still see some points missing. So I thought I’d “chime in”.

I have the uncommon experience of being around at the advent of email. This lends some really great insight into our current situation with Twitter.

Back in the old days, any sort of commercial message delivered via email garnered an immediate negative reaction. After all, the Internet was a place of intellectual pursuit, blissfully separate from the commercial world. Every once in a while, someone would get the bright idea that they would sell their stuff or services via this new communications medium. They would be immediately greeted with mountains of hate-ridden email in return (flaming). That deterred many people.

But soon, many creative marketers learned they could send email without giving a genuine return address, and thus the era of spam was born. You’ve probably heard most of the rest of the story with email.

So now we have this new communications medium: Twitter.com.

Unlike email, each user chooses who can send them messages. It’s more like an RSS reader than email. It’s pull rather than push. In fact, when you look at it stripped of all the extra nifty softwares that have come out to make twitter easier to use, it’s really just a blog. A blog that allows you to post only 140 character posts.

So any cries of “spam” are completely ridiculous. If someone posts a commercial message on a blog, can it in any way be considered spam? No.

It just feels like spam when you’re using a nifty reader like twhirl or tweetdeck.

Keep that in mind. How it feels is actually kind of important.

When someone is new to Twitter and asks me to give them advice on how to use it, I almost always say “Use it to entertain or educate. Everything else is questionable.” After all, if you merely entertain and educate for a good long while, you should develop a nice following that actually reads your tweets.

Once you’ve developed a following, and really understand the ‘culture’ of twitter, you can decide whether you’d like to use it for other purposes or not.

That leads us to the Commercial use of twitter. Using twitter to build a business is quite possible. Just read Twitter Power by Joel Comm. You can tactfully talk about your business, even link to your products and promote them, without too much of a problem. Make sure to slowly transition your tweets from purely entertaining and educational to more talking about what you’re doing in your business. Don’t just suddenly change.

In that light, we can talk about some specific tools and tactics.

TweetLater is a service that allows you to automatically publish tweets at a given time. It also allows you to “Auto DM”. That’s an automatic direct message. Lots of ‘twitter gurus’ have made their opinions known about these types of services, and I thought I’d give my 2¢.

An auto-DM when a new follower follows you, in my opinion, is totally fine. Don’t make it too hypey or grandiose. If you have some free products you give away, go ahead and put them in your auto-DM message. It’s like a gift for following you. I think it’s also just fine if you require them to give their email to do so. Some twitter gurus would disagree with that.

As for the auto-tweet at a given time, I really think that’s tacky; unless you personally research and write them. A tweet is by its very nature a personal message. Automating it and making it thus impersonal seems wrong. I only follow a very few people who use such things, and I generally ignore their messages unless directed to them by someone else.

That’s the other danger in your abuse or over-commercialization of twitter: People can start to ignore you. They might as well unfollow you. This is the same issue as with email marketing. But generally, in twitter, people take the moment or two it takes to ‘unfollow’ you rather than just ignore you.

I think this danger, the ignore danger, will increase dramatically if twitter decides to add advertisements to the mix. Users will get used to ignoring them, and thus will find it easier to ignore the users they don’t value, rather than unfollowing them.

A note on ‘educate’:

When I say to educate, it can come from pearls of positive wisdom, or links to sites with great information. If you think you’re educating anyone with pearls of negative wisdom, think again.

140 characters really isn’t much. It’s enough to make a comment, display a link, or quote someone. It certainly isn’t enough to display ‘evidence’ of any kind, support an argument, or fully explain yourself. That’s why you should never use it to try and change someone’s mind. That’s what I mean by pearls of negative wisdom.

Do you like to be periodically hit with negativity? I sure don’t.

This leads to a more overarching rule that I hope you’ll follow:

Never, and I mean NEVER tweet about politics from a stance.

The only possible result is pissing off half your followers. 140 characters can only insult, not inform. Leave that for your blog.

If you want to comment “Wow, Candidate X had over a million attendees at their Chicago rally”, that’s just fine. No stance there. But a tweet of “Candidate X is a baby killer and should end the war now!” will do nothing but make supporters of Candidate X dislike you. There is no other result. You cannot sway even a single vote in 140 characters. It is NOT possible. If that’s your goal, make your arguments on your blog and direct your followers to the blog post with a URL in your tweet; but make the tweet polite.

So with those warnings in place, I’ll direct you to some positives.

You have the power to enrich people’s lives with this little tool.

You know things. You have unique insight. You are like a parent to everyone else in the world that hasn’t seen what you have.

That’s one of the great things about parenting, you know. You get to introduce someone new to the wonders of the world.

Think of yourself in such a way, and direct people to things that are enthralling, amazing, entertaining, and profitable. Pointing out the latest funny video on YouTube is the easiest form of this suggestion. Sure, it’s nice, and it’s fun. But it’s only an appetizer. Direct people to the banquet of information you’ve found on the Internet that has enriched your life.

I love seeing the latest tech gadgets, the latest scientific discoveries, the latest archaeological finds. It’s great to have someone ‘in the know’ in these areas point them out.

What areas are near and dear to you? Think anyone would be interested?

Believe me; however obscure, there’s a BUNCH of people that are interested.

Bring your uniqueness to the ‘twitterverse’, and people will follow you. They might even spend money on something as a result of your suggestions.

Nathan Anderson

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