3 Ways to Become a Better Twitterer

You hear a lot about how to get new followers and become part of the conversation on Twitter. I want to focus a little on some ways you can go above and beyond your normal tweeting routine.

Here are 3 things you can add to your normal Twitter routine that can help deepen the experience and add more value to your conversations.

1) Reply to replies to let people know they’ve been heard (communicate)

In a perfect world, everyone would reply to everyone else’s tweets. When you think about how Twitter works and the number of followers that are actually online at any one point, you can see how this wouldn’t work.

Now imagine a real life scenario where you make a comment and someone responds however you don’t acknowledge their response. It can be demoralizing. If we can’t improve the quality of the conversation on Twitter overall, we can at least make an effort to make people feel included. At times this might not be possible due to the number of replies or simply that you are away from Twitter when a response is received but it’s the effort that counts.

2) Choose a follower and learn something about them (discover)

A lot of people join Twitter with selfish motives and secretly optimize their Twitter “strategy” to drive more traffic to their site. I have no problem with this as long as their strategy includes providing valuable content to the community.

Now what if we all took the time to learn something new about one of our followers every day. It’s the first step to creating real relationships beyond casual conversation. I think sometimes people forget that a big part of social media is it’s relationships.

3) See how your network interacts outside of twitter via Brightkite, Seesmic, FriendFeed, etc. (explore)

I’m becoming a big fan of video posts. There’s a certain level of honesty behind seeing someone’s facial expressions as they share their thoughts and ideas. I can’t guarantee that any one service is going to become big but I can say that all will have an affect on social media as we move forward. Seesmic has been making moves as well as sites like Brighkite and Tweetworks. So if the conversation on Twitter isn’t enough for you, why not enrich the conversation with some video, pictures or even a location.

- Photo by Poldavo (Alex)