Jimmy Gilmore

A few months ago a client asked for a cheat sheet on how to uses social media tools. Here’s more or less what I gave them on Twit­ter. See some­thing impor­tant miss­ing, let me know and I’ll add it. Note: This list isn’t a sub­sti­tute for a strategy.

1. Fol­low some good tweet­ers to get a feel for it and find a voice you feel com­fort­able using. There is no one right voice.  @chrisbrogan, @postachio, @comcastcares, @delloutlet and @lancearmstrong are exam­ples of pop­u­lar tweet­ers using very dif­fer­ent styles.
2. Under­stand fre­quent users will never visit your twitter.com page. Your brand/identity must be in your com­mu­ni­ca­tion or where you send users.
3. Use Bit.ly or other tool to shorten links and col­lect data.
4. Use CoTweet or Hoot­Suite to opti­mize your work­flow and track analytics.
5. Engage­ment is earned with time and by pro­vid­ing value. You must be ded­i­cate sig­nif­i­cant time to get any value from it.
6. Be help­ful is the Golden Rule of social media.
7. Use Twit­ter lists to man­age the infor­ma­tion flow.
8. Add to con­ver­sa­tions that are already hap­pen­ing instead of expect­ing them to come to you.
9. Re-tweet often – peo­ple like to be pat­ted on the back. Add a comment/value to your re-tweet.
10. Try and reply to @ mes­sages, but you don’t have to reply to everyone
11. Try and thank peo­ple for re-tweeting.
12. Ignore the “What are you doing?” ques­tion and answer more inter­est­ing ques­tions like, “What inter­ests you right now? What did you just dis­cover? What are you pas­sion­ate about? What is some­thing pos­i­tive you can share?”
13. Fre­quency is key. Don’t feel bad for tweet­ing the same mes­sage again if it’s valuable.
14. A mes­sage will be viewed on someone’s Twit­ter page or Twit­ter client only if they hap­pen to be look­ing at it at the time when you Tweet. And you prob­a­bly have a lot of com­pe­ti­tion for atten­tion. Again, fre­quency is key.
15. Tweet about other peo­ple you respect – no one likes any­one who only talks about themselves.
16. Give fol­low­ers some­where to go, some news, or some­thing to do or read. There’s no inter­ac­tion with­out action.
17. Peo­ple will fol­low your tweets if you pro­vide them what they find valu­able. Usu­ally that’s news, inside infor­ma­tion, enter­tain­ment or deals.
18. Use search engines or Twit­ter client to cre­ate searches on rel­e­vant top­ics and your brand.
19. Use Google Alerts.
20. Find other users with sim­i­lar inter­ests and fol­low them, get a feel for what they’re doing and engage them.
21. If pos­si­ble, have more than one tweeter.
22. Obvi­ously, be eth­i­cal and transparent.
23. Let peo­ple know you’re on Twit­ter by putting your user­name on e-mail sig­na­tures, web sites, blogs and offline communications.
24. Try and fol­low peo­ple back who seem legit­i­mate; this gives them the oppor­tu­nity to direct-message you…which could be important.
25. Don’t be bor­ing. Don’t just Tweet PR lan­guage or links to press releases. This is not a push medium.
26. Don’t treat it like a broad­cast mech­a­nism for advertising.
27. Don’t read every tweet; you’ll go mad.

Update: If you found this list use­ful, check out my Face­book Fan Page tips for busi­ness users.