How To Get Started On Twitter

My friend Bridget runs a blog that’s been going on for a few years now on building social media profiles, and Twitter is her bread and butter. I’m going to line up her posts in a logical way to show you how to build yourself up on it.

The one thing I can recommend doing while reading/watching videos – make a personal twitter for yourself to practice with! Bridget runs several accounts – a personal one, the business one, her social media advice one, her political one, so on and so on. I have two – my public and my secret one where the “non-professional” stuff goes.

First Step.

She gets way more energetic in future videos, I promise! In that post/video, she explains what makes Twitter different from other social networks. In short, it’s the conversations that take place there.

Second Step.

We all start somewhere. This is how Bridget got started.

Third Step.

This is the first thing to start working on as the manager for your account. You’ll use this as a baseline for keeping yourself organized.

Fourth Step.

This is the best definition of hashtag you will find on the internet. This will become one of your most used tools on Twitter.

Fifth Step.

Now that you have the account organized and are thinking about what hashtags you can use as tools to build conversations, here’s the next part of building your account.

Sixth Step.

As you build followers it’s time to start learning about how to Retweet. My personal favorite is the Old School RT. Comment tweet is my second choice, and Rewrite Tweet is what I’ll do when posting articles from my online news reader.

Side note – you will see Hootsuite and Tweetdeck mentioned a few times at this point. Using one of them is for the power users, and eventually you’ll work your way up to them.

Seventh Step.

By now you’ve been building your conversations, you’re RTing other accounts and following new people/places and building your twitter lists. Now it’s time to create your influence.

Final Step.

This is how to think of twitter in the long term, and I get a mention in this post!

When you reach this point, you can start moving over to Tweetdeck (my favorite, since it updates in real time) or Hootsuite (which I love using through Feedly desktop) to step up your game to the professional level. Bridget’s GuruMinute Video series and her advanced “Keys To Being Social” series compliment everything said above, and are the next steps to being a Twitter professional.