Twitter? What's A Twitter?

Thinking about jumping in to the Twitterverse? A friend of mine - the Atlanta Movies Examiner - was contemplating the same thing, and asked me for advice. The following is a synopsis of my advice and follow up comments.

1. Tweet only information that would be of use to other people. Nobody really cares what you are having for breakfast, lunch or dinner. I usually tweet about my latest blog posts, kid-friendly activities I find out about, general news, funny tidbits. I'll also send out a tweet about my experience with a particular vendor ­ say, if I had a really great experience at a certain store, or a particular associate was really helpful. People also tweet about the bad experiences they have with anything ­ flights, traffic, products, customer service. They'll often follow their tweet with FAIL.

2. 140 characters really limits you, especially if you have a long Examiner.com link you want to insert. I use link shorteners to circumvent this. My favorite is bit.ly. It provides easy to understand analytics as well.

3. To try and increase clicks to my blog, or to @TextileWorldMag news stories, I¹ll try and tie my tweet into a trending topic (you'll see these on the right hand of your Twitter page), or an item of interest in the news, the latest magazine you¹ve read ­ a general nugget of news or pop culture information that everyone knows about. It's all about synergy.

4. If you¹re really into personal branding, use your name as your Twitter handle. I use @SmyrnaGirl, which I kinda regret cause it doesn't sync up with my LinkedIn pages or bylines.

5. I use the favorites feature (click the star to the right of a tweet and it will be added to your Favorites) to save tweets that I'll get around to reading later. I use this mainly as a repository for links to how-to articles about Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook. And the occasional SNL or Late Night sketch video!

6. Some of my favorite people I follow - this list includes those that tweet helpful information about technology and business, celebrities, and random people that are interesting:

@Broslife
@ActuallyNPH
@snapfishbyhp
@shitmydadsays
@MoRocca
@SeanENelson - LinkedIn expert
@ATL_Joblist
@KrogerDeals
@cobbcountygovt
@daddyclay - from DadLabs, great, funny parenting website
@WholeRecipes
@JennyDeVaughn - great social media tips
@victoriadunmire - great social media tips
@atlantabench

The Follow Up

1) Re: #4, would you recommend using "Atlanta Movies Examiner" or something else as my Twitter handle? (Presumably if I do the latter, it won't make as much sense for me to tweet about non-film-related topics or articles I've written about.)
I'd see what other Examiners are doing. If you want to strictly tweet about film-related topics, you might want to stick with something like ATLMoviesExaminer, though Twitter only allows you 15 characters.

2) Did/do you have a strategy for building up your list of followers?
No, I didn't have a strategy. There are several tools out there that people use to automatically follow people who use certain keywords in their tweets. I notice I get a surge in followers for TW right after I tweet about sustainability, or recycling. Or You'll notice people's tweets mentioning "You can get 100 followers a day. Click this link to find out how." But I feel this kind of defeats the whole purpose of Twitter, which is to foster communication that will hopefully lead to real-world relationships.

With TW and Billian's, I am going about it kind of under the radar. Most of my TW tweets point to TW content, or to our advertisers events/information.

Billian's I foresee being more synergistic as soon as I can get everything up and running. With that account I plant to tweet about our latest products, updates, white papers, etc., as well as industry news. Overall I hope to create synergy between the BHD website, and our pages on LinkedIn and Facebook.

Do you have Facebook or LinkedIn accounts? If you put #in or #fb at the end of your tweets, they will show up on your LinkedIn and FB pages.

3) How much time, if any, do you spend tweeting other people's articles, etc. as part of a strategy to encourage them to tweet about you?
If I think it's of value I'll retweet it. If it's someone I know, I'll retweet it.

Help! I'm Addicted to Social Media!

I realize the irony of writing about Internet addiction on the Web, and then disseminating that information via Web-based social media sites such as Twitter and MamaSourcce.com, as well as personal e-mail. But, that doesn’t mean I’m addicted!

I’ve come across quite a few articles dealing with the subject in the last week or two, which makes me think, could this really be a problem for some women? Apparently so.

One article I found recently on CNN.com dealing with social media addiction – the inability to disconnect from sites such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc. — even goes so far as to say that “[r]apid-fire TV news bulletins or getting updates via social-networking tools such as Twitter could numb our sense of morality and make us indifferent to human suffering, scientists say.” Yikes.

While the above statement might seem a tad harsh, I can see how too much time spent following Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore on Twitter might make us want to stay connected a bit longer than is healthy. And I can certainly see how working moms might find it hard to switch “off” once they get home from work, especially if they use social media tools at the office.

Elizabeth Cohen, in "Five Clues That You Are Addicted To Facebook," presents the case of Cynthia Newton (not her real name), a mom that works from home, and who uses Facebook for both professional and personal reasons.

"I'm an addict. I just get lost in Facebook," Newton said. "My daughter gets so PO'd at me, and really it is kind of pathetic. It's not something I'm particularly proud of. I just get so sucked in."

Newton says she spends about 20 hours a week on the social networking site, half the time for work -- she runs an online business -- and half just for fun. She's tried to cut down on her Facebook use but failed.

"I can go a whole day without Facebook," she said. "But I've never made it through an entire weekend. I've thought about going cold turkey, but that would make me so uncomfortable. I know I couldn't do it."

Funny, I was just considering starting a Facebook page – for strictly professional reasons of course. I figure as long as I can make time for dinners, laundry, cleaning, bath time, playing with the kids, etc., I should feel entitled to a few minutes on my favorite sites. Right? Tweet me at www.twitter.com/SmyrnaGirl and let me know what you think!