Believe it or not, I’ve been on Twitter since 2007, thanks to one of my favorite employees @markglesne (he’s now a  rock-star-big-wig-online-executive-dude at some company in Thousand Oaks — Yay MARK!)  Mark pressed me for months  to get on this thing called Twitter and I resisted it with every bone in my body.  After all, I thought, I’d just joined Facebook and decided it was way cooler than MySpace (and therefore abandoned MySpace soon thereafter), and I had no clue how  a site that focused on just 140-characters of what coffee someone was drinking was truly “interesting” or engaging to my target audience.  Reluctantly and rather begrudgingly, I joined.

In less than a year of being on Twitter, I was hooked. (Thanks, Glesne!)

Over the years, I’ve blogged about and spoken on and even been quoted about different topics related to Social Marketing.   I have also focused some of those topics specifically on Twitter Marketing. (but enough about me…toot-toot!)

Today’s post is a short one, but a good one… one I believe we all need to remember as the years go on, Twitter grows and we all – marketers, personal users, business folks — continue to embrace (or come back to embracing) Social Media…

Susan’s 10 Points to Twitter Etiquette  (or as I’m dubbing it: Twitiquette):

1.  DO… thank people for following you, even if it’s in a canned direct message.  It’s the thought that counts, people! I also see people doing @replies to say thanks…not bad either and adds a bit of a personal touch!

2.  DON’T … keep sending direct messages to people once they’ve followed you – it’s annoying, few read them and it’s kinda Spammy. (Side Note: the Twitter DM feature is pretty useless in my mind…hope they can it soon!)

3.  DO … engage with your followers by tweeting important messages or news, @reply folks, favorite them, list them and even RT the really juicy stuff.  Everyone likes to know you’re reading their stream. (don’t be dirty now)

4.  DON’T … tell me your every move…even if you’re a celebrity…it gets annoying (for most of us, minus the occasional stalkers) and honestly, you’re not doing anything good for the  brand called You. Trust me on that.

5.  DO … follow people you WANT to follow and that you can read.

6.  DON’T  … follow people by the hundreds or thousands just because they followed you…why? First of all, I’ve never had the “follower mentality.”  Take that for what it is.  But secondly, you can’t possibly read EVERY news feed, can you? Garbage-in, garbage out.  Be selective and engage with folks that engage you (see point #3) and you and your followers will be happier for it. I know this goes against the grain of Twitter and certainly for some of us early adopters, we started following in the thousands to get followers…but what we found was that quantity does not equal quality. Huh, image that: Direct Marketing 101!

7.  DO … Use hashtags (#) in a meaningful way, especially when your content is relative or contextual.

8.  DON’T … Use hashtags just to get in on the popular news streams, you annoying Spammers, you!

9.  DO … @Reply with relevant stuff or conversations you want to be public …(see #3 above) …if you want them to be private, use that useless DM feature on Twitter…until it goes by-bye (which I predict will happen soon, or it will get a big makeover)

10.  DON’T EVER EVER EVER – @reply me with no message and just a link to some advertorial landing page article about how a single mom who worked from home made $8,176 in one month! Thanks to Twitter’s (relatively) new blocking feature, you will be blocked, I will @reply that you’re a SPAMMER, and I WILL report you to Twitter.  Hmph!

I’m sure there’s more, but that’s all I have time for today…  Carry on now, my lovely Tweeters.

Be Sociable, Share!

•