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Jamila's Twitter Guide for Culture Lovers

April 27, 2009 Jamila

Tags Deep Thoughts, Small Biz Tidbits

So I've noticed a whole lot of Twitter guides lately and thought I would write one from my perspective as a culture junkie. I posted something on my Facebook about being addicted to Twitter and got quite a few responses that made me see how the point of Twitter is lost on a lot of folks still so these are my humble suggestions for making Twitter interesting and valuable for you.

1. Get a Twitter Application

Download a Twitter app such as Tweetdeck. There are a few out there, but I use Tweetdeck and am very happy with it. It allows you to fully use Twitter and it is free to download. Do it now.

2. It's all about who you follow

Follow interesting people! This is the key. At first I was just following random people I found through other people's follow lists. This is a crap shoot and made my tweet stream pretty random and boring as alot of folks just tweet about their sales and really boring mundane things which are only interesting if you know the person, and maybe not even then. I have made some handy lists for you below to get started following some key people in all different fields.

3. Be interesting!

Be helpful and/ or interesting with your tweets. Restrain yourself from posting too much about whatever you sell. Here and there is ok, but don't pollute the tweet stream with spam. It is boring and will repulse most people, with exception of other spammers. The best way to gain followers ( and admit it, you want more of those right?) is to be interesting with your tweets! Don't sweat it though, let yourself get stream of conciousness, write poetry if you want, non sequiters, just be yourself. Posting about websites and blogs you like and find helpful is a really nice thing to do as well.

4. Re Tweets

Re tweet other peoples especially interesting tweets, but don't make your whole stream re tweets. That is lazy.

5. Replies

I personally find it boring when the person's whole stream is replies, and generally will not follow them unless they are just totally awesome anyway. You can tell replies because the tweet begins with @name and usually make no sense to you, as they were not replying to you....

6. If you need help with the basics

If you are brand new to it and want to read a good Twitter primer, here is a good website for that.

Super interesting people and organizations to follow:

Funny people

http://twitter.com/Seth_Rogen

http://twitter.com/ThatKevinSmith

http://twitter.com/TinaFey

http://twitter.com/diablocody

http://twitter.com/jimmyfallon

http://twitter.com/pagecrusher

http://twitter.com/dooce

http://twitter.com/yeahdave