The Basics – Get personal and be real

Username: Choosing the right username is important – there’s no harm in using your actual name of course, providing someone else hasn’t taken it already! If your desired username has been taken, choose something that reflects you and how you’ll try to use your Twitter account. There’s no harm in being totally professional, but a little bit of character will make you seem more human.

Picture: Upload an image of yourself – preferably nothing too risqué! A nice simple headshot will do the trick, it makes communicating that little bit more personal. Alternatively, you can create your own cartoon avatar and customise it to make it look how you wish!

Bio: Write a short bio including who you work for and what your interests are. This will help tweeple (Twitter people) find you as well as giving them information about why they should follow you once you start tweeting.

Protected Updates: Privacy online is a hot topic and will continue to be so as long as your personal information is deemed valuable, and it is tempting to hide your updates to just your immediate friends. However, on Twitter if you’ve got something to hide people will want to know why and they will be cautious about following you, if not put off altogether! 

Website: Include your blog if you have one, this helps to make you more ‘real’ to anyone who comes across your profile. You can also link to a LinkedIn or Facebook profile, or even your Flickr page.

---

Followers – It’s not stalking, it’s interaction

Finding people to follow on Twitter can initially seem daunting, but it needn’t be! One way of doing this is identify someone you like or pick a top ten list. Take time to have a look through who these tweeple are following – chances are they’ll have divided the wheat from the chaff and will provide a good starting point.

When you start following someone, there’s no harm in introducing yourself – it’s a small step in building a relationship! Simply put @ in front if the person’s name and they will see the message, even if they haven’t started following you back.

---

Tweeting – Everybody has something to say

Once you have started to follow a few tweeps and seen what they are tweeting, it’s easy to want to dive right in and tell them what you’re doing right now. But, will informing them that you’re half way through your first coffee of the day be beneficial to them?

Be Interesting: Personal tweets add a flavour to your personality. If it is the third or fourth time you’ve mentioned your breakfast within the space of two hours though, you are sure to lose your newly gained followers because it does nothing to add value to their Twitter experience.

Be Informative: If you find something on the Internet that you are still reading a few minutes later, this is likely to be great Twitter material. Tweet about it, include a link, and give a short summary of what your followers will see if the click on the link – the headline will usually suffice.

Be Interactive: If you see a tweet with an interesting looking link, have a read/look/watch and pass it on it by retweeting it – place RT at the front of your message – the original tweeter will be grateful and your followers may then retweet your tweet. The benefit of this is that you can see what your followers are interested in and their followers will see your name and possibly start following you!

Try to follow the 9/1 rule of thumb – for every ten tweets, try to make nine of them Interesting, Informative or Interactive and one personal. This means you will avoid flooding your followers with spam, and demonstrate you’re providing valuable content.

---

Content – The perfect tweet?

You’ve only got 140 characters, use them wisely!

Value: Try to add as much value to your message. For example, “Just saw Watchmen” could be extended to “Saw Watchmen movie. Graphics brilliant! Great action scenes, you should see it!”

Links: If you are tweeting a link, the URL is likely to use lots of characters. Use a URL shortener such as Bit.ly, Is.gd or Zi.ma to cut URLs down to 7 or 8 characters.

Be concise: Read your tweet before you send it – are there any words which can be made smaller? Why say ‘procure’ when ‘get’ will do? Can you use symbols to get your message across? Use & instead of saying ‘and’, or % instead of ‘per cent’ for eg.

Remember to leave some free space for someone to retweet your message, just in case ;-)

---

What’s the value of Twitter?

Twitter is an instantaneous service, and because tweets are so short, updates from one user can come through thick and fast.

You can ‘friendsource’, which means you can ask your contacts quickly and easily if they can recommend  someone or something, and you can share information with tweeps who have similar interests to your own.

Twitter is starting to report news events as they happen, beating traditional media forms to the scoop. Conferences are increasingly live-tweeted, for example. Or, take the Denver plane crash in 2008 as an example – the news broke that it had crashed when a passenger tweeted about it, and that tweet was retweeted. A similar situation occurred with the Hudson plane crash earlier this year and the fires in Australia.

---

Professionalism

We are in an age where everything we do has the potential to show up on the Internet. Look at how many newspaper stories now contain pictures taken from Facebook accounts of the people involved.

It is very challenging to provide a full ‘check-list’ of Twitter do’s and don’ts, because it is used in different ways, for different things, by different people.

To that extent, here’s something to bear in mind if you’re not sure about tweeting:

Would you shout your message across a crowded room to a group of people you’ve never met?

---

Security

As with the rest of your online life, security of your private details is paramount, and as with all new technologies, Twitter is becoming the target of cyber criminals.

There are many third party applications that you can use alongside Twitter, and some ask for your password to access the data that they will use. Bear this in mind when you’re entering your details. If in doubt, don’t enter your password.

But in any case, you can of course search Twitter to see if there have been any reports of security issues surrounding the application if you really must try it.

Make sure you change your Twitter password once a month to minimize the chances of your account becoming compromised.

---

Now you’ve got it...

Now you’re getting the hang of twitter, why not start experimenting?

You can change the layout of your background very easily. There are lots of different designs and there’s bound to be one to suit you! Have a look at some of the backgrounds on Twitbacks, Tweetspace and Free Twitter Designer

Twitter now has an inbuilt search function which allows you to look for keywords or phrases in the Twittersphere, this can be very useful if you need to find information quickly or are looking for client related tweets.

You’ve probably noticed that you can only see Twitter update by refreshing the page that is open in your browser.

To make your life easier, there are lots of cool programs you can download which run on your PC in the background and update Twitter in real-time. Some of these are Tweetdeck and Twhirl ) which are simple to install and easy to use.

The benefit of using a program like this is that you can let them run unobtrusively on your machine and you can monitor for keyword in real-time.

You can also download different applications that allow you to update Twitter from your mobile, Ubertwitter, Twhirl and Tweetie should be your first port of call, depending on what type of handset you have.