Tips for Twitter Novices BY a Twitter Novice

Harley Grove really haven’t been using Twitter for very long and we are always learning of new ways in which to make the most of it. We thought that it might be a good idea to share some of the tips that we have picked up in such a short time; we’ve also been asked by several people and / or businesses who haven’t “got” Twitter yet to give them some guidance and to share our extremely limited experience of the whole Twitter phenomenon. Please note that there are far more Twitter-knowledgeable people out there so this is really our view as a novice to Twitter and hopefully this blog will help similar novices.

The first thing we had to do was sign up as a Twitter user at twitter.com which was pretty painless. The hardest thing to do was to work out how to describe ourselves; don’t know about you but it’s not so easy to sum your company up in just a few words. We then set about learning how to use Twitter itself using the main Twitter website interface and started sending Twitter messages (known as tweets).

However, we found it pretty useless just using the main Twitter interface as we were unable to group the incoming tweets into “that looks interesting” or “what a load of rubbish” categories.  So, once we got the hang of using Twitter itself, we started looking around for some alternative desktop client applications. Well, we only have one Twitter account so we decided upon TweetDeck (if we had had more than one user account, perhaps we would have looked further into other desktop client applications such as Seesmic). We find TweetDeck to be the most user-friendly desktop Twitter client application and it makes it easy to monitor tweets and to group them in a meaningful and useful way. It also has a built in web address shortener which we have found invaluable as in Twitter you are restricted to tweets of up to 140 characters and no more !!! By the time you have added perhaps a long web address to a tweet, you soon run out of characters.

One of the reasons that some people give for not using Twitter is that it “takes too much time” or “I’m always out of the office”. Well, these were the scenarios that, to be honest, we were particularly bothered about. We then found TweetLater and this solved the problem (and then some !) as it allows you to schedule tweets to be sent out on a regular basis as and when you want (every hour if you want). The beauty of it is that you are able to create a subject to tweet about and then create several different ways in which to say anything about the subject; this is then randomised as the tweet “hits” its scheduled time.

The next “problem” to resolve was that of being able to access Twitter whilst away from the office on our mobiles. Well, the iPhone mobile clients seem great to us but we don’t have iPhones; we have Blackberry Storms. So, first of all we downloaded and used TwitterBerry for a while, until ÜberTwitter was released and this is the mobile client that we now use as, in our opinion, it is so much better and has some really great extra features over those found in Twitterberry. We take photos with our Blackberry Storms and upload from within Ubertwitter and this works a treat.

We also decided to try and save ourselves some time by using an add-on to auto-follow those twitter users that followed us and to send an automatic message to them. Some readers might think that this is maybe too impersonal but if you don’t have enough hours in the day but still want to send a message to new followers then we consider this to be the best next thing to writing individual messages of thanks. Also, because we use TweetLater for this as well, the “Thanks for following me” message changes each time automatically and therefore the messages can be really polite each time.

We have found it great to gain more Twitter followers but to be honest we would rather have a few quality followers than thousands of followers who are not really interested in what we have to say; some Twitter users just want to gain as many followers as they can themselves without really caring about the person they might temporarily follow. For this reason, we periodically go through all of the Twitter Users that we are following and also those that are following us and complete a block unfollow of those that we are not interested in following any longer. We currently use TwitterKarma to do this and this seems quite effective. We also use UnTweeps which seems to work a little different than TwitterKarma in that it monitors those Twitter users that you are following that have not created any tweets for some time and are most likely to have left Twitter entirely.

We have also recently come across TwitterForBusyPeople and this is great for looking at all of the people you are following and just seeing their most recent tweets; you can always then look at their other tweets if you have time.

If you are out of the office quite a lot as we are, then it is probably very important that you don’t miss out on potential opportunities that might appear within Twitter users (tweeple) tweets. We particularly want to know if anyone mentions any of the software packages that we supply, implement, train and support so that we could offer our help and, if completely honest, hope to make a later sale to them of our services. Well, that is where TweetBeep has helped as if any of the keywords that we specify is tweeted anywhere in the world, we get an email alert to let us know that it has been mentioned and we then choose whether to start the dialogue with that Twitter user and perhaps to start following them.

Anyway, we hope that we have given you some basic ideas and we hope that these tips (many more to come in the future) will help you gain more from Twitter. We are novices but if you really want some expert Twitter information then we would strongly recommend @NikkiPilkington ’s TweetMentor Twitter training.

Finally, the most IMPORTANT point (if you are not already) :