4 Steps to Run with Twitter

I helped a client, Martin Amm of adenin, set up a twitter account since he’s a very busy feller. It was a breeze compared to when I set up my twitter account for the first time. The difference: Experience. I made two blunders, which better helped me understand the mistakes.
Mistake #1a: Selecting a bad ID. When I started, I chose “contentmaven” as my twitter ID. That coupled with a picture of my book cover told nothing about who I was.
Remember, the bio doesn’t show up unless people click your twitter ID. So people saw something like this:
contentmaven Brilliant insight that has everyone retweeting and linking. OK, so I am dreaming. Hey, it’s my blog post. 🙂
Any idea who wrote this? Unless you have super vision, you can’t see my name on top of the book cover. So I changed my ID to merylkevans and replaced the book cover with my mug shot. I thought it would be less egotistical to have a book instead of my face, but it’s A-OK to use your face.
Mistake #1b: Picking a so-so ID. The new and current ID I use is “merylkevans”. Few of you don’t know my middle name or middle initial even though I sign almost everything with it. By this point, this ID was already ingrained in twitter.
Also, experts recommend coming up with an ID no longer than 10 letters. The “K” makes it 11. Remember @yourID in replies already takes up 12 letters (@ plus name), so you’re down a few characters before you share your thoughts.
Good news about mistakes #1a and 1b: It’s not a disaster. Most of us “Reply” to tweets or click on our IDs. I don’t enter a person’s ID often because many don’t use their names or a short variation of their name. Besides, there’s always search.twitter.com and twellow.com. Twitter also has a drop-down box of people on the Direct Messages page.
Mistake #2: Following everyone. OK, many big shots do this and encourage it. For the rest of us, if we follow 2,000 folks, we can’t add any others until we have 2,000 following us. So I chiseled my list when I hit 2,000. Besides, it created a lot of needless noise in my timeline (seeing updates from everyone I followed).
Martin has another advantage over me. He has a niche in intranet software. The people I follow often discuss writing, marketing, technology, business, and games.
Plus, Martin’s company has a short name. Sweet! That takes care of the ID thing. OK, his company is officially adenin TECHNOLOGIES, Inc., but shortening it to adenin is no problem.
As for following — I searched for software and intranet professionals and experts. I took care to ensure Martin doesn’t follow too many people as a starting point. It’s about keeping the following, followers, update ratio healthy and not spammy.
Four Steps to Blast off with Twitter
So the first things we did for adenin on twitter:

1. Sign up with a short ID.
2. Post a bio and location.
3. Add a picture (avatar). It took time as twitter kept giving us “Over capacity” message even though the picture was smaller than the max size.
4. Post a mix of updates: retweeting, linking to high quality intranet-related resources that have nothing to do with his company’s product or web site), and replying to other comments. Not one link or mention of his company’s product other than in the bio.

Going forward, we’ll continue with #4 on a consistent basis while slowly adding more people to follow to keep the following:followers:updates ratio balanced.
Twitter offers the opportunity for Martin to meet other intranet experts, software journalists and editors, and professionals interested in intranet software. The key to twitter is to think of it as building relationships and not as a “get rich or get publicity fast scheme” like all those internet marketers tend to do.
If you’re interested in intranet conversations, let me know so I can be sure Martin follows you so he can listen to you.