The Wall Street Journal recently declared that Twitter has now gone mainstream. The article cites two companies in particular that are using Twitter with great success: Zappos and Comcast. Both are early adopters of the technology and have been very active on the service. Speaking of active, the article states that one of the main downsides of Twitter is the frequent service outages. There have been so many instances when I’ve tried to do something and the little Tweet bird exclaims that the servers are currently over capacity. However, I can personally testify that things have been better recently.
Service problems aside, it is safe to say that Twitter is quickly becoming an important communication technology. With so many people jumping on though, rules of engagement is becoming important as recent adopters butt heads with early adopters and some unsavory characters attempt to take advantage of the open community.
Believe it or not Twitter does have some etiquette rules with some pretty interesting communication standards. To help you with this, Sarah Evans recently wrote a very useful guide to growing a community on Twitter. Here are the basics Sarah mentions to help you get the most of your “tweets”:
- Do… Create a user-friendly Twitter ID (@yourname)
- Do… Search for people to follow
- Do… Learn the lingo. You’ll want to join the crowd. Trust me.
- Do… Add your Twitter ID to all of your signatures
- Do… Reach out and say something
- Do… Read the bio of those who follow you
- Do… Promote others and share your best information
- Do… Learn the etiquette.
- Do… Find out who some of the big players are
Read Sarah’s article for details.
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