Twitter Cheat Sheet for Beginners

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Are you a new to Twitter and not exactly know how to get started? This post will explains several easy tips to help you build, organise and manage your Twitter account.

1. Following Others

Other tech experts and influential people, of course. It’s okay if you don’t know them in real life. All that matters is that they’re sharing content and resources that will aid in your growth and inspire you to be a better person.

2. Grow Your Influence (and Followers)

Another fun part of Twitter – aside from the unlimited opportunities for learning – is the ability to grow your followers and extend your reach. The more Twitter followers you have, the further your voice can spread. Grow your followers by sharing relevant content and sharing yourself. People are listening and you could inspire others with a simple thought you described in 140 characters or less. Don’t forget to use relevant hashtags and show up to live chats.

3. Have No More Than 5 Followers? Here is How To Fix It

Start off slowly. Don’t go on a follow frenzy and follow every person you come across. Try to balance your “following” to “follower” ratio. That shows other users that you value a “healthy” communication and relationship. You want potential followers to notice that you are balanced between “learning from others” and “letting others to learn from you”. If your follower count is higher than your following count there’s a good chance people will deem you “followable”. As silly as it seems, having many followers can sometimes translate to: “I’m someone worth following.”

However, if you’re following 300+ people and only have 5 followers, potential followers will think that you are trying too hard, or worse, people might not want to be around you. The good news is that it’s avoidable. Move slowly and clean up your “following” list every once in a while. If someone doesn’t follow you back, maybe you need to consider to unfollow them, especially if they less to no value to you. However, do not unfollow some highly influential folks just because they don’t follow you back because, well, their content is worth it.

If someone follows you, take a look at their bio. Consider these questions: Are they in your field? How many people follow them? What are their most recent tweets about? Are they active on the platform? Sometimes you will end up with at least a handful of followers who seem to have come out of nowhere. They may work in a field you’re not even remotely interested in or have a bio that reads something like “WILL GROW YOUR FOLLOWERS FOR $$$”. In this case, you have no social obligation to follow these folks back.

4. What is The Instant, Fast Way to Grow Your Followers?

This is not a sprint. Commit to growing yours consistently, over time. Twitter is not going to fade away any time soon. Yet, there are two suggestions for maximising your time and using the platform efficiently.

A. Use Social Media Tools

Do not be constrained to only tweeting when you “have free time”. You can grow your followers faster by automating tweets and scheduling posts ahead of time using a social media management tool like Hootsuite, Tweetdeck or Buffer. With these tools in hand, you can schedule your tweets for the week during Sunday night. Hootsuite has a useful little app called Hootlet that allows you to bank any piece of content you view online and auto-schedule it for later.

B. Participate in Live Twitter Chats

Do you know that live chats provide the greatest opportunity for connection and collaboration on the web? Not only do these chats inspire and educate, they give us a chance to work with like-minded professionals across the globe. If you’re nervous about speaking up or contributing, lurk for a while. Get to know the players. Make sure to favorite and retweet any tweets that you identify with or enjoy. This action alone will attract plenty of followers. Once you get comfortable you can start contributing. You will notice that your followers started to grow significantly.

5. How to Participate in Live Chats?

Live chats happen almost every day of the week at an agreed upon time. The chats are facilitated by one or more moderators who keep the conversation moving with thoughtful prompts or questions that adhere to the agreed upon topic. Use a weekly calendar to stay organised. If you are using a social media management tool like Hootsuite, you can save your favorite chat streams so you don’t have to remember them from week to week.

6. Twitter at Conferences 

Many popular conferences use a special hashtag to encourage attendees to tweet about their conference experience. This is particularly useful for folks at the conference who are torn between attending several difference workshops but have to choose just one or two. Following the conference hashtag lets you hear what’s going on in other workshops. You can choose to follow it in real time or archive the stream to review and catch up on later.

7. Create, Contribute and Share

Show off your expertise by starting a blog and sharing your knowledge with others. There’s another people out there searching for inspiration and resources. Starting a blog is quite simple. Use a CMS (content management system) like WordPress, Tumblr or Squarespace. These platforms allow you to create and design a blog with little to no programming expertise. Once you have a piece you’re proud of, go ahead and share it via relevant hashtags on Twitter. If your content is good, don’t be surprised to see people subscribing to your blog and literally “following” you online. Contribute to your community.