Twitter, Part 2: What to Tweet
Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Newsletter, April 2012
Twitter, Part 2: What to Tweet
A key principle: Twitter is about building relationships over time.
That means if all you do is shout sales messages, you’re wasting most of Twitter’s potential. Yes, if you have a popular brand or retail store, your customers do want information about bargains. But they also want to feel like a human being is talking–and listening.
Personally, I strive for a ratio that is no more than 10 percent blatant self-promotion. The other 90% is a mix of passing on links to interesting information (often by retweeting someone else, with acknowledgment), responding to requests for–or asking for–advice, commenting on news or trends, engaging directly with people (responding or passing on a tweet, saying thank-you to people who have retweeted me, mentioned me as someone to follow, or mentioned my latest book (Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green), or just bringing a smile with a quote or a cool picture.
However, if other people say nice things about me or my offerings, I will retweet and/or thank them, and I don’t count that toward the 10 percent.
I guess it must be working, as I get 20 to 50 new followers in a typical week, all of them earned organically, without any game-the-system crap.
Last month’s Twitter, Part 1 newsletter brought this comment from Sherry Lowry in Austin, TX (@sherrylowry on Twitter):
“I really love Twitter (or actually the Twittter-related tools) and was expecting when reading your March news to either:
– see clips from your Twitter stream
– a chance to click right into or follow you
Ask and ye shall receive, at least this time. To follow me on Twitter, visit @ShelHorowitz or https://www.twitter.com/shelhorowitz
And here are five of my Tweets (all posted April 1). You’ll notice they illustrate several of the types above.
RT @TalkAboutIssues
Fact: President Ronald Reagan, an icon to most conservatives, supported increases in the debt limit 12 times over his two terms.#Obama2012 [Retweet]
Blog: How Southwest Airlines is Greening Their Planes
https://greenandprofitable.com/how-southwest-airlines-is-greening-their-planes/ [passing on interesting links–in this case, an automatic post to Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn from my blog]
Fabulous! Beethoven’s 9 10,000 in the chorus, Japan https://www.youtube.com/embed/paH0V6JLxSI[passing on an interesting link that I found elsewhere]
@maddow I’m hoping for 39 x 3 more years of your speaking truth to power. Very happy birthday. [engaging directly, in this case with TV commentator Rachel maddow]
RT @SW_Coalition: Denise Hamler of @GreenAmerica will be hosting@ShelHorowitz for a talk on green business at (cont) https://tl.gd/goltff [Retweet of someone else’s tweet that promotes me]
I’m a pretty active Tweeter, so you can see lots more at https://twitter.com/shelhorowitz
