The Several Habits of Wildly Successful Twitter Users

Twitter is a deceptively simple utility. That said, Twitter isn’t for everyone. In fact it’s probably not even for half of everyone. But for those that have the patience to find their personal sweet spot, Twitter can be quite good indeed. If you’re not familar with Twitter, it’s pretty easy to describe. It’s instant messaging with a group. You post a short message via IM, web or other utility (see below) and other Twitterers who are “following” you will see your message. Some have called Twitter a form of microblogging and I think that’s a helpful way of looking at it. Most people don’t quite “get” Twitter at first. This post aims to give you a leg up on the learning curve. For starters, you’ll need an account and you can do that here (yeah, it’s free). Once you’ve got your account, you might feel lonely. I’m here for you, buddy. Just click “add”.

Just a little more intro before we jump into the Habits. Most Twitter newbies are underwhelmed by what they find there. It seems…useless. And unless you persevere a bit, you’ll probably walk away from your account wondering what the fuss was all about. This post aims to help give you a leg up on the Twitter learning curve. One last note: if you’ve never used instant messaging before, this may change your mind. It may also be the last straw that convinces you to become Amish. You’ve been warned.

Habit One: Make the right friends
This habit is pretty much the engine that drives many of the other habits. It is so easy to “follow” someone in Twitter that many folks go a little bit overboard at first. If you can handle the firehose of twittering, go for it. Otherwise, don’t get wrapped up in the “more is better” trap.

• Really think about what kind of info you want pushed your way. If you’re interested in what all the cool geek kids are doing, then go ahead and follow them–they’re all there.
• You can add friends on the web by going to their profile and clicking the “add” link.
• You can add friends via IM, if you know their username by sending an IM to the twitter@twitter.com contact and typing: follow USERNAME
• You can add your friends cell phone numbers by sending an IM to the twitter@twitter.com contact and typing: add CELLNUMBER (where CELLNUMBER is their number)
• Alternately you may be the only person in your social circle who does IM, in which case you might only want to get particular types of news pushed at you. There are currently several Twitter accounts that will serve up various flavors of news. You can follow the BBC (there are a bunch of flavors, just search for ‘bbc’ in the Twitter search box), the Digg frontpage, CNN breaking news (again, type ‘cnn’ in the search box to get the most updated options). There’s no ESPN, or Fark or Slashdot yet (at least that I can find, but I’m sure they’re coming).
• The search box is your friend, use it. Also, don’t be shy about bouncing around and looking at who’s following who. You’ll discover a lot of interesting people out there. Just remember that you can always turn down or turn off the firehose of information if becomes overwhelming. To turn it off, just send this IM to Twitter: off And I bet you can guess how to turn it back on…

Habit Two: Put it where you want it
In it’s most basic form, Twitter is a webpage with a text box where you can enter a little message. But you don’t need to stop there.

• Once you’ve got your account set up, you can add twitter@twitter.com as a contact in whatever IM software you use (I use Adium on the Mac, and it’s awesome).
• Additionally, you can get your Twitter pushed to your phone, if that’s how you want it. Just check the appropriate bits in your devices settings. You can send SMS to 40404 if you’re in the US. Outside the US use +44 7781 488126
• If you use Gmail and GoogleTalk, you can add twitter@twitter.com as a contact and get your stuff there.
• If you’ve got a Blackberry, you should check out the Google Talk client and use it there. As if you needed another reason to fiddle with that thing in meetings.
• Same deal with Treos, actually. Any of the Treo IM clients will work with Twitter. If you must, just Google “Treo IM” and you’ll get a lot of leads. I’ve tried a few, but it’s really more than I can take. Good luck to you.
• On the Mac you’ve got a couple of standalone options. There’s Twitterific and Twitterpost. Regardless of which one you use, be sure to add the corresponding Twitter user to your friends list in Twitter. Twitterific is at http://twitter.com/twitterific and Twitterpost is at http://twitter.com/twitterpost. You’ll get updates on bugfixes, etc by adding them.
• If you’re rocking the PC you might check out Twitteroo. As with the Mac options, add the Twitteroo user as a friend in Twitter: http://twitter.com/twitteroo. There are no updates as I write this, but I’m sure that’ll change.
• If you want to take all this just a little bit slower, you can just grab the RSS feed for all the folks that you’re following, or for individual users. If you don’t IM, and you just want to follow a few people, you can grab their feeds–just go to their Twitter page and look at the bottom left corner for the RSS link. Subscribing to your own RSS feed (the one that contains all the twitters from the people you’re following) is a good idea. It acts as an archive of the content which can be quite helpful.

Habit Three: Own it
If you’re unafraid of spreading yourself around the web, be sure to claim your Twitter page with Technorati and expand your digital empire. If you don’t have a Technorati account, just sign up (free). Once you’ve got your account go to your blog settings and at the bottom of the page there’s a place to put in your blog url. This is just http://twitter.com/YOUR-USERNAME. Replace YOUR-USERNAME with, you know, your Twitter username. You’ll then be presented with two options for claiming your blog (which is just your Twitter home page). Choose the posting method. Copy the code and send it to Twitter via any of the methods described above. Done.

Habit Four: Address your followers
By default, when you send a note via Twitter it goes to everyone that’s following you. If you just want to send a note directly to someone, you can get them via the direct messages web interface. Additionally, if you’re twittering via IM, you can use the direct command to send private-ish messages to a contact. Just type: D USERNAME your message here. That’ll send a message directly to that person without bothering all your other followers. If you don’t mind hitting everyone else with a private message, you can publically address that person by following the standard “@” convention. That is, just type: @USERNAME: your message here. That way everyone knows who you’re talking to.

Habit Five: Hack it
People are doing interesting and innovative stuff with Twitter. Feel free to leave a comment if you know about cool Twitter hacks that everyone should know about!

• Check out this recent post over at Lifehack.org that covers “five ways to use Twitter for good.” I particularly like the ideas of friendsourcing and quick human answers.
• Also, various mashups of Twitter search results, RSS feeds and jedi tricks with stuff like Yahoo Pipes can result in some very interesting customized info streams. Check out Christopher S. Penn’s post on Twitter Power Tips.
• Use your skills to take your favorite RSS feed (or spliced feed) and HTTP POST (via API) to create a custom Twitter account that anyone can befriend.(hint: this can be a nice traffic builder…but only if you have the skillz)

Habit Six: Play with it

• Use the Firefox Search Plugin to post directly to your Twitter account (so cool)
• Use the Twitter confessional to get clean
• Participate in the Twitter fan wiki (tons more tools in there)
• View info about Twitterers by posting: whois USERNAME This will return the standard Twitter bio for that user
• Try Steve’s Twitter search engine
• Search for friends and coworkers. Heck, search for the guy that just sent you his resume.
• Check out the Twitter help page for more tips on commands. Also see this Library Clips post for more of the same.

So there you go. This is by no means a comprehensive list of Twitterliciousness, but I hope it gets you thinking in new directions, and helps give you a leg up on figuring out Twitter. As a final sign off, here’s a brief wishlist that I’d like to see built into Twitter:

• A way to create an account with an RSS feed for auto-posting (rather than having to work with the API)
• A decent integrated search engine
• Some kind of groups feature with privacy options. It’d be nice to have a Twitter group for my office. I know this can be hacked, but we are not a technical people at my office.