Twitter is all the rage right now. Everyone from news networks, celebrities, athletes, marketers, teenagers, schools, churches, and government officials are tweeting it up.

The real time interaction is incredibly powerful networking and marketing tool. It’s like you’re attending the world’s biggest, never-ending networking party. What this provides for marketers, affiliates, PR, or anyone wanting to gain momentum and authority, in real time, can’t be done anywhere else.

However, to enjoy the benefits of Twitter, and other social networking websites, there are a few rules, or rather guidelines, that will help you have a much more effective Twitter presence and have more fun doing it.

25 Twitter Rules To Tweet By

1. Don’t try to follow too many too fast. The power of twitter is in your followers, but if you try and follow thousands of people right at the start you will be come overwhelmed very fast trying to keep up.

2. Set up your profile. Before you even follow anyone, or send your first tweet, make sure your profile is completed.

3. Have an avatar. Yes, having a picture of yourself, or logo, is a big “must” when networking on Twitter or any other social media site.

4. Respond to @replies as quickly as possible. This is how you communicate with Twitter. By placing @ and then the username you can have a conversation or solve problems. The key is to respond as quick as you can.

5. Respond to Direct Messages in a timely manner. As with the @replies, your Direct Messages are also a way of communicating just between you and your follower. This is a little like email, but you are still limited to 140 characters. Respond quickly and efficiently.

6. Tweet before you follow. Having a few updates available for people to see when they check out your profile is a good way for them to know who you are and show you’re not a Twitter spammer.

7. Follow slowly, but consistently. I already touched on this above, but it is important that you get this concept. Start following a few people to get use to the idea of Twitter and then continue to find others. Once you start building, then continue to do so in a consistent manner. Adding a few people a day is a great way to naturally add people who fill follow you for the long haul.

8. Offer solutions to problems. You’re going to see a lot of questions and people looking for solutions. This presents you with a great opportunity to interact by offering those solutions. Reply to those people with links, information or anything else that might help them.

9. Promote others before yourself. One big turnoff is when people just advertise their own blog posts or services. The real “networking” happens when you begin to promote other people and their products, without monetary compensation for yourself.

10. Have a Twitter landing page. A Twitter landing page is a great way to maximize your Twitter presence and develop new followers of not only your Twitter account, but also your blog or website. A landing page will take over where your profile ends and gives a much better look at who you are and what you can offer.

11. Stay active. Keep to regular tweeting schedule. It’s pretty easy when you first get started because it is new and fresh. The hard part comes in when you don’t feel like you have anything to say at all. However, just a simple “Good morning!”, or “How are you doing today?” can start a conversations. Try to keep something happening on your Twitter stream so people don’t forget about you and unfollow you for inactivity.

12. Make an effort to build relationships with followers. This might seem unlikely to those people who are following thousands of people. But, if you’re just using Twitter as another opt-in list to blast your own links and build up your own ego, then you’re missing the point. Make a focused effort to send DM’s or replies to people to get to know them. Or, you could just say hi to someone each day. @ZnaTrainer is a perfect example of this in action.

13. Go mobile with your tweeting. Twitter is all about getting to know people while you’re letting them get to know you. You can’t just do that while at the office or at home. Using one of the many mobile Twitter clients can keep you connected even when you’re not at a computer.

14. Sync other sites to your Twitter stream. This is a great time saver in social media marketing. By syncing your Twitter stream with other sites you can post/update several sites at once. Of course, if you’re going to be involved in a lot of networking sites then Ping.fm is the best solution to updating to them all.

15. ReTweet often and frequently. ReTweeting is really just tweeting something that someone else in your stream did. This way the people who follow you can see it too and see the person who originally sent the tweet. This is a great way to share information and find new people to follow. Don’t do this for everything, but anything you think your followers would enjoy, or use, then by all means… ReTweet it!

16. Use a desktop client for ease of use and quick twittering. You can continue to refresh the actual Twitter website, but thankfully developers have made some desktop twitter clients that automatically update and have some great features. Tweetdeck and Twhirl are the most popular now and are both pretty good.

17. Automatically update Twitter with your latest blog posts. While you want to make sure that this isn’t the only thing that is seen on your Twitter stream, it is a good idea to have your new blog posts automatically updated to Twitter. You can do this easily with Twitterfeed

18. Keep to the 140 character limit. I have had several times where I wanted to send several tweets in a row to finish a thought that was a lot more than 140 characters. It seems like a good idea, but what it does is confuse the people who are following you. They might just happen to see it in mid tweet and not realize what it is you’re talking about. If you have to take time to explain it then you’ve lost the effect you were going for.

19. Don’t let the number of people you’re following vastly outnumber your followers. For a variety of reasons this is a bad thing. The two most important is that Twitter itself will not let you add more followers if this ratio is too far out of whack and they might suspend your account. The other big reason is that the people you want to follow you back might think you’re just a Twitter spammer.

20. Stay active but take a breather. It’s good to stay active with your tweeting, but don’t get too active. Twitter is a social creature. That means there are others involved in this too. It’s not all about you and your precious updates. If you’re updating 20 or more times every 30 minutes then your tweets will be overpowering everyone else’s. This can cause people to get frustrated and just choose to unfollow you.

21. Don’t Tweet something you don’t want public. Twitter is a great way to socialize, but it is also a great way to get into some serious trouble. Even if you didn’t mean to. Twitter is searchable. So, if someone wanted to search for something at search.twitter.com and your tweet happens to come up… let’s just hope it’s not something you didn’t want to say.

22. Link to other tweets in your own content or blog posts. Again, twitter is all about socializing, collaborating, networking, and helping each other out. In the same way linking to other sites in your articles or blog posts is a great way to spread around the love, linking to your friend’s tweets is also beneficial.

23. Don’t follow if you don’t want to follow. Twitter can be overwhelming if you let it be. Part of that is because you begin following too many people and are trying to keep track of it all. Or you’re following people who you just don’t have anything in common with. There are different rules of thumb for following people. Some people live by the “follow me, I follow you” rule of thumb. And others just follow those they feel will add something to their twitter stream. Of course, there are those that just follow a certain few and ignore everyone else. I’m probably in the middle somewhere as I follow a wide variety of people because you never know who is going to add value to your Twitter stream. But, I will unfollow if nothing is there.

24. Take your Twittering offline. There are these great things that are happening all over now that are taking Twitter to the next level of social networking. It’s called a TweetUp. Basically it’s a meet up made up of local twitterers who want to interact and share in the real world. Tweetups are a great way to maximize Twitter in your marketing and if you have the opportunity to participate in one… don’t hesitate.

25. Don’t get into pointless arguments. This is one of my pet peeves. I hate arguments. I think they are pointless and only lead to tension and hard feelings that don’t go away quickly. In the heat of the moment, things are said that you can’t take back (remember #21). This makes you, and the person you’re arguing with, look bad and don’t be surprised to see a lot of unfollows as a result. While I do agree that some differences of opinions, and slightly heated conversations are good… arguments are immature.

There you go.

25 rules for tweeting and participating in social networking. While I used the “rules” term to describe these don’t get too freaked out by it. The best thing to do while social networking, or being active on Twitter is to be just that. Active. And learn the rest along the way.

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