People are constantly asking me about the best way to ‘do Twitter’. In order to give them a brief, bite-size resource to refer to, I’ve drawn up this list of my top tips. Hopefully you’ll find something useful here, even if you’ve been at it for a little longer!

Things to do…

• Decide early on what your tone of voice will be. Do you want to come across as very professional, very informal, or somewhere in between? Also give some thought to what you’ll be tweeting about.
• Utilise the power of lists. You don’t have to be following someone to add them to a list, making it perfect for keeping an eye on their updates without diluting your main feed.
• Treat tweets and direct messages like email. Reply as soon as possible to keep the conversation flowing.
• Make good use of favourites. Bookmark interesting tweets (containing links, or needing a reply) by ‘favouriting’ them.
• Fill out your profile with meaningful information. There’s nothing more off-putting to a potential follower than a blank bio.
• If you follow a prolific retweeter, you can turn off their ‘RTs’ to reduce the noise in your Twitter feed. Go to their profile page, and click the little green retweet button just under their name (toggles their retweets on and off).

And things to steer clear of…

• Don’t be tempted to talk politics or religion. Unless it’s relevant to your tone of voice, it’s likely to offend people if you get involved.
• Don’t be too concerned about increasing the number of your followers. Twitter is about conversations, not numbers. If you’re saying something worth listening to, the followers won’t be far behind. It’s always nice to say thanks when someone follows you too.
• Don’t follow more than 250-500 people. Better to engage meaningfully with a few carefully chosen contacts. If someone communicates with you, communicate back, and if they retweet you, have the courtesy to thank them.
• Don’t place information in your Twitter background image. Too often it gets hidden behind the main page content, which looks rather unprofessional.

Now, go and be awesome!

If you have any extra tips that I haven’t mentioned here, please leave a comment. Thanks!