Getting started, tools, tips, tricks and what not to do July 2014 Louise McGregor Changememe.com CC-BY

Twitter Basics

Introduction ......................................................................................................... 3

Chapter 1; 3 Twitter Basics .................................................................................... 4 1: Your profile ...................................................................................................................................................... 4 3: Who to follow? ............................................................................................................................................... 6

Chapter 2; 3 More Twitter Basics ........................................................................... 7 1: Your Tweets ..................................................................................................................................................... 7 2: Building a following ....................................................................................................................................... 8 3: Twitter Etiquette ............................................................................................................................................ 9 4: Increasing the Interaction ........................................................................................................................... 9

Chapter 3; Tools for Twitter ................................................................................ 10 1: Tools for using Twitter .............................................................................................................................. 10 2: Analysing Twitter ........................................................................................................................................ 11 3: Managing Followers ................................................................................................................................... 11 4: Measuring Reach ........................................................................................................................................ 12 5: Visualising Data From Twitter ................................................................................................................. 12 6: Archive Tweets ............................................................................................................................................ 12

Chapter 4; Companies on Twitter ........................................................................ 13 1: Customer Service ........................................................................................................................................ 13 2: Customer Engagement ............................................................................................................................. 13 3: Marketing ...................................................................................................................................................... 14 4: Online Brand ................................................................................................................................................. 14 5: Build a Customer Network ....................................................................................................................... 14 Some Do’s .......................................................................................................................................................... 15 Some Don’ts ...................................................................................................................................................... 15

Chapter 5; Trolls, fakers, hackers and scams ........................................................ 16 Fakers .................................................................................................................................................................. 16 Trolls ................................................................................................................................................................ .... 17 Hackers................................................................................................................................................................ 18 Scams ................................................................................................................................................................... 19

A final word ........................................................................................................ 19

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Introduction This whole series was inspired by someone I’ve never met, asking a questions on a discussion forum. After giving a few tips on getting started I decided to put together a short guide to help people get started, which turned into five posts and about 5000 words. Twitter is a micro-blogging service available online or via various apps. It was created in 2006, but real growth in user numbers didn’t start until early 2009, which is about when I joined, a year later I started a company account which I ran for about two years. I use my personal account (@changememe) to find new content, to post my own content (I tweeted all of the blog posts in this series), interact in regular chats and to share things I’ve found online. I’ve met new people, solved service issues, and been invited to speak at a conference via twitter. For me it’s been a positive experience and I use twitter every day. Here are the basics of what I’ve learnt in five years of using twitter, I hope it helps you to get started. As with everything in the online world I’ve checked all the links, data and information, but things change. If you spot an error let me know via twitter, I’ll do my best to correct it. I’ve released this under a creative commons licence, CC-BY-SA this means you are free to use, re-use, adjust or build on this work, I only ask that you credit me, preferably with a link to my blog, and share the new work under the same licence. Louise McGregor Changememe.com

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Chapter 1; 3 Twitter Basics

Your profile, Twitter conventions and who to follow.

1: Your profile

There are a few things you need to figure out when setting up your profile, if it’s a brand new account it will have the new format, if it’s an old account it will soon have the new format so I will focus on that here.

Your twitter handle essentially what are you going to call yourself. The maximum length is 15 characters, but shorter is better particularly when it comes to retweets. You can only use letters, numbers and the underscore (_), you can change your name at any time. With millions of users a lot of the “obvious” twitter names are already in use so you will have to come up with something new; there’s a tool to help you with that.

If you are a company and someone has the twitter handle of your company name you may need to come up with a creative version of your company name. Exceptions are when the account is being used as a spam account, or when the account is inactive, in these cases you can claim the name from

twitter directly.

Describe yourself you can add your real name, location and a website link. You can also describe yourself in 160 characters or less, you can use hashtags in this space as well if you want to link to a theme of content.

For personal accounts there seems to be a trend to mix the professional, the personal and the humorous or surprising, as exemplified on Madeleine Albright‘s current twitter profile (shown on the left). Some companies try to follow this pattern, oreo manages to add humour to their profile.

Your avatar the picture beside your name. Twitter recommends an image size of 400px x 400px, this means it will look good on your profile page and be resized for all other

uses. I suggest checking how it looks after upload though – you still want it to look good in the 73px x 73px as it appears in the stream next to each tweet you make.

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Not uploading an avatar means you’ll get an anonymous silhouette image, some people won’t follow accounts that have not bothered to upload an avatar.

Header image the large image appearing at the top of your profile page. The dimensions for this are 1500px x 500px, but you do have an opportunity to resize and adjust the image after uploading.

2: Conventions for tweeting

Once you’ve got your profile set up it’s time to take a deep breath and start tweeting. Here’s a few things you need to know to get started.

@someone beginning a tweet with someone’s user name means your tweet is brought to that person’s attention. So if you send a tweet with @changememe in it, I will see it in my notifications. This is important because I don’t watch my twitter stream all the time and if you don’t use this method I probably won’t see your tweet.

The dot if you begin a tweet with the “@” sign the tweet will only land in the stream of the person (or people) you’ve mentioned. If you put something before the “@”, a full stop for example, the tweet will more widely seen.

Seen by @josecelades, he gets a notification. Seen by people who follow both @josecelades and me.

Seen by everyone who follows me (and @josecelades still gets a notification)

Hashtags; these are ways of adding a subject to your tweet, simply put “#” in front of the word you want to connect to. Twitter users use hashtags to find relevant information, to have conversations and to add humour to a tweet. They’ve also been used for political effect, as I write this #YesAllWomen is trending.

RT/MT/HT the most common is “RT”, which means I’m retweeting someone else’s tweet. You can now retweet from the twitter platform, which gives a nicer format to the retweet, but the tweet remains the same.

MT is short for “modified tweet”, a rather rare cousin of the RT. It’s used if you’ve altered the original tweet in some way. I do this if I’ve taken a tweet in Dutch and am retweeting it in English for example.

HT is short for “hat tip”, it’s a nice way of giving credit to a fellow tweeter or other source.

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In all cases you should include @username of the original sender, and when you do this it shows up in their notifications.

Here’s an example of a retweet.

3: Who to follow?

When you first join twitter it seems weirdly empty, until you start following people. Here are some ways to find people to follow.

Search hashtags search for hashtags relating to your interests or your company interests, when you see some tweets of interest follow whoever tweeted them. Conferences are a fertile ground for this as they will often use a specific hashtag making your search easier. In addition the audience has already identified themselves as being interested in that theme, and the posting frequency is high for the duration of the conference.

Find Experts who are the leaders in your industry? who would be the most influential thinkers? look for their twitter accounts, you’ll have an instant stream of content if it happens to be Guy Kawasaki.

Follow people those experts follow there’s a good chance that the people your selected experts follow are also interesting for you to follow. Alternatively look for the people who are interacting and retweeting the expert’s content a lot.

I always do a quick check of the person’s profile and recent tweets before clicking the follow button, I don’t want to follow any fake accounts and I generally avoid the crazies.

Follow people back as you start adding content to twitter and interacting with others people will start to follow you, it’s polite to follow back.

In the next chapter, you’ll learn more about creating tweets and building a following.

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Chapter 2; 3 More Twitter Basics

Your tweets, building a following and twitter etiquette.

1: Your Tweets

I try to balance my content between commenting on things I’ve found on the internet, publishing my own content and interacting with other people. I am probably tweeting most prolifically at conferences and events. I’ve also used it to comment on television programmes (Apprentice and Dragon’s Den in particular). Increasingly I use it to interact with brands – sometimes to to thank them, but more often to get support. Here’s my “how to” for all of these content types.

Your own content I write about innovation, communication and leadership on my blog Changememe.com, I have connected it to my twitter account, meaning that every post is publicised on twitter the moment it’s published. This has an advantage because wordpress lets you schedule posts, meaning your tweet goes at the same time.

I’ll also post personal observations, as I’m often in random locations to write there tends to be a coffee theme.

Events I tweet a lot at conferences and other events, my twitter feed often becomes my “notes” after the event. It’s also a good way to find other people who tweet relevant content, and conversely a good way for other people to find you.

Other people’s content As well as using twitter I see a lot of articles, blogs and videos online every day. If I’m sharing a tweet I tend retweet it to give the source credit.

If I find content some other way I will make a new tweet with my own comment. I try to credit the source so if I know a relevant twitter handle I will add it, as shown in the tweet at right.

I want people to credit me when they share my content so it’s only fair I do the same.

Second Screen There’s a phenomenon going on where people watch TV, while interacting via a social media platform. I sometimes do this, mostly during the BBC shows “Apprentice” and “Dragon’s Den”. It’s fun, although it can be an

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opportunity to snark.

Chat sessions Twitter chats are a way to have an open discussion on twitter, at a specific time and usually structured via a series of questions.

I’ve been involved in the #ESNchat, about enterprise social networks, but they cover every subject from architecture to yoga, from cakes to veganism. I’ve found a twitter chat schedule, with the appropriate hashtag, of course you can also start your own.

Interaction with others Don’t be shy – twitter become more useful and more fun the more you interact. Just use the @someone function, or reply to their tweets. Most often the person responds. Sometimes good stuff comes from it.

Interaction with brands Many brands offer a service channel via twitter (or facebook), and customers expectations have grown regarding the responsiveness and the content of the response.

I’ve had mostly good experiences when I’ve used these channels, although I think that in some companies they solve the problem for me on the day, but don’t actually solve the problem over all (Gatwick Express was one example, they explained that I couldn’t book home-print tickets on the day of travel. But no commitment to change an illogical anti-customer practice.)

2: Building a following

Only people following you will see your content (unless you use the @someone function to address a person specifically), so if you’re sharing content you need to build a following of people to share it with and to interact with. Of course if you’re just using twitter to discover information then this isn’t so important, you can just focus on finding people to follow.

Most people will follow you back, unless they’re in the stratosphere of the twitterati, where the follow back rate is typically less than one percent (of the top twenty on twitter by number of followers only Britney Spears and Barack Obama are above 1%). I tell you this to manage expectations.

So the best thing you can do is follow people you find relevant and interesting. If you do this slowly and steadily your follower number will grow.

DO NOT follow hundreds and hundreds of people each day, ( and do not unfollow hundreds and hundreds of people at once). You will look like an “aggressive follower” to twitter’s algorithm, which would then consider your account as likely to be spam. You also look less credible to potential followers, even humans think high follow to follower ratio looks spammy.

DO NOT buy followers, it goes against the twitter rules and it doesn’t really add anything to your account. You won’t see better content, and you won’t have a bigger real audience. All that happens is a bit of PR kudos for having

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so many followers – until someone looks closer and figures out millions of those followers are fake – then the PR turns negative.

3: Twitter Etiquette

Some people use automatic “DMs” (direct messages) to thank you for following, it’s a nice touch (to manage expectations - I don’t do it). Some auto DMs include other ways to connect to a person or brand such as linkedin or facebook, which seems slightly pushy to me, but OK still OK. One person used their auto DM to ask me to buy their book. I unfollowed. I found that a step too far. If you’re going to use auto DMs I recommend a simple message, or invitation, not a sales pitch.

If you post something on Twitter it’s public, and permanent.

Don’t be the guy who tweets about his pay, don’t be the sport fan that abuses players online, don’t threaten other twitter members, think before you make a questionable joke. Check the public shaming site for more examples.

Twitter has moved to make reporting abusive behaviour on twitter easier, but there are still plenty of jerks around. Don’t be one.

4: Increasing the Interaction

You will get more retweets if you ask for them (add “please RT”) at the end of your tweet. And you’ll get more favourites or retweets for tweets that contain images or video.

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Chapter 3; Tools for Twitter

Using twitter, analysing twitter and managing your following. I’ve highlighted some of my favourite tools, but be warned, there are new tools every week.

There are lots of tools for using twitter, some for tweeting and scheduling tweets, some add greatly to existing twitter functionality, others help you manage your followers, and some focus on data visualisation based on twitter’s data.

In generally they are using twitter’s API to pull publicly available data from twitter and presenting it to you in more useful ways.

I’ve tried a lot of tools over the years I’ve been using twitter and these are my favourites.

1: Tools for using Twitter

I am a fan of TweetDeck, I can manage multiple accounts from it, across multiple devices (I have an android phone and an iPad), and it provides multiple columns which is handy for specific searches and for any tweetchats that you join.

It will also let me schedule tweets. There are social media experts out there who say you shouldn’t schedule tweets, and there are examples where it has gone wrong. And there are social media experts who say you should (selectively) schedule tweets.

I do schedule some tweets, including my blog posts, but I schedule them for times where I am online, and able to respond to any interaction. I use TweetDeck for this.

Twitter now allows scheduling from company accounts, and their are other tools out there, Hootsuite is probably the most popular and it has the added advantage of giving you some analytics, although the most interesting data is only available for paid accounts. (See the advantages and disadvantages of Hootsuite).

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2: Analysing Twitter

I’ve used Tweroid, which tells you the best time to tweet based on when your followers are online and active.

My profile for weekdays is shown on the right, you can see activity drops off a cliff after 10pm, which is one reason I schedule tweets. It makes more sense to publish at 3 or 4pm than at 9am or 10pm.

This is something I check about once a month, the peak online time has got slightly later over the last year. Possibly because I am involved in twitchats

some evenings.

I’ve used twittercounter to check some analytics, in the free account you can get some basic statistics and three months worth of data.

The graph on the left shows followers vs following for my account over the last three months, you see that I’ve kept my following number close to

my follower number. It’s also on a gratifyingly steady increase.

3: Managing Followers

I use unfollowers.me to track my followers. I’ll generally follow back if the account looks like a real person who is tweeting genuine content, this tool helps me identify fake or inactive accounts. It also shows me who has followed or unfollowed me recently and lets me follow back (or unfollow) from within their application.

There’s another tool around that will validate followers for you called truetwit. I haven’t used it but have been asked to validate my account by people who are using it. Most days I only get a few new followers so it’s easy enough to validate them myself, but I can imagine for those on very popular accounts who want to ensure their followers are real, this would be a time saver.

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4: Measuring Reach

If you need to know how far your tweets reach Twitonomy will give you an overview of how your tweets perform. Tweetreach will track how far a single tweet reached, how many times it was retweeted and how much exposure it ultimately got. Hashtracking will track how far a single hashtag reaches.

For detailed analysis of your twitter reach you’ll need to pay for a premium service (I haven’t reached that level yet).

5: Visualising Data From Twitter

To see who is tweeting around the world there’s A World of Tweets, which generates a real time heat map of who is tweeting around the world.

It also ranks countries by tweet volume since it started producing data in 2010. The USA is first, but perhaps more surprisingly Brazil comes in second. Netherlands comes in eighth – producing 2.8% of tweets. Not bad for a country with a population of just under 17 million people.

Visible tweet has a cool animation of tweets on a subject of your choice, but not really useful information beyond that. If you want to know where your own twitter followers are then Tweep Maps.

6: Archive Tweets

One of my favourite ways to store twitter conversations is Storify, it allows you to curate a story timeline based on a hashtag, keyword or contributor names. The story is then available for anyone to read with links retained, plus when you publish it all the people whose tweets you’ve collected receive a notification, which is kind. I’ve used it for various events, here’s one from a PR and social media event last year.

This chapter comes with a caveat, the market of twitter tools is changing, I went through this list of Twitter tools from two years ago and found that 30% of the tools don’t exist anymore.

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Chapter 4; Companies on Twitter

How companies can use twitter for business, some “do’s and don’ts”.

I’ve written about some of the basics of using twitter in earlier posts, now I want to take a look at how companies are using twitter for a business purpose. I want to focus on companies getting it right – but I will point out some #fail moments!

The first thing to think about is what is your purpose for using twitter, I’ve broken it down to five options, but of course most companies use a combination on the same twitter account. Which you use will depend on your business; but make sure you have the customer service sorted out first.

1: Customer Service

One of the most common ways of using twitter is as a customer service channel, sometimes known as webcare. This means answering people’s questions online, regarding your company’s products and service – sometimes even when the question hasn’t been directed at you. Here are some examples of customer care tweets. I think you need to have good customer service in place before trying the other options here, otherwise you will hear complaints where you are trying to have a discussion.

Companies doing this include; ING, Citibank, O2, Yahoo (or flickr), AT&T and Delta.

2: Customer Engagement

Beyond supporting your customers with service you can use twitter to have a conversation with your customers. The benefits to the company are around brand perception, this is a way to demonstrate the human approachable dimension of your brand.

KLM, the Dutch airline, uses social media really well, providing good customer care around the clock and connecting with customers using humour.

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Here’s an example from KLM;

@SusanAretz posted a picture of a KLM plane from Madurodam, a miniature village filled with scenes from around the Netherlands. She tweeted “I’m curious where this @KLM flight is going”. Soon after KLM responded “Hello Susan, this is a special flight, destination ‘Dreamland’ :-)”

3: Marketing

Twitter can be an effective marketing tool, it can be used to promote events, generate leads – by offering whitepapers via email signup, and offer discounts or coupon codes. Those three options can be used for free, but their effectiveness is going to depend on your existing following.

You can also use either promoted tweets, or a promoted account. It’s hard to find accurate figures on these because twitter promoted tweets uses a bidding process similar to internet ad words, and the promoted account costs are based on a cost per follower. You can however set a budget so you can cap your spending for a twitter marketing campaign.

4: Online Brand

Twitter, and social media generally, is a great tool to share your online content. Companies use it to increase the reach of all sorts of content from press releases to timely product information. For example we’ve just had a series of electric storms in the Netherlands and ING tweeted a link to their general storm advice, including information regarding insurance.

5: Build a Customer Network

Providing quality help/support, sharing selected information on twitter first, hosting relevant tweet chats will all build a strong customer network. If you can build a customer network on twitter they will share your content by re-tweeting, expanding your reach. They may also answer questions about your

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brand on your behalf, and in times of crisis can help by spreading your crisis news and reactions.

Some Do’s

1. Acquire a twitter handle that matches your brand, usually your brand name.

2. Use your logo as an avatar, it appears next to each tweet in your followers’ feeds

3. Use a brand related image as your header image 4. Specify the hours the account is monitored and responding; note if

you’re an airline there’s an expectation that this will be 24/7 5. Verify your account; with the official blue tick if you can (this is available

for really famous people or for those with a decent ad spend on twitter). Link from your twitter account to your company site, and from your company site to twitter – this provides some verification for your followers if the blue tick isn’t an option

6. Choose the right person/people to manage your account, they need to know twitter but they also need to know your company.

7. Identify who is posting if multiple people manage your account, the convention for this is ^name or ^initials

8. Set up guidelines for your account including the purpose and tone of voice, this is especially important if your account is managed by several people

9. Control sign-on, there have been a number of cases where employees tweeted from a company account by mistake – thinking it was their personal account. Consider using separate tools or apps to prevent this happening.

10. Use hashtags – carefully – there are plenty of examples of hashtags going wrong.

11. Tweet regularly, daily. 12. Respond and RT. 13. Listen to and understand your followers – the more expert they are on

social media the greater the opportunity to interact.

Some Don’ts

1. Do not hijack a hashtag relating to a humanitarian emergency 2. Do not allow scheduled tweets to run unchecked when a major event

occurs. 3. Do not confuse your personal and professional twitter accounts (they

can often run in the same app). 4. Do not tweet sensitive information. 5. Do not over-react, everything you say is public. 6. Don’t use the lawyers as a first response.

For more information see; 9 Examples of Social Media Screw Ups (& 1 genius response)

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Chapter 5; Trolls, fakers, hackers and scams

The dark side of twitter; how to spot the fakers and scammers and what to do.

As with any other community on or offline Twitter has its share of malevolent members. Some are merely irritating, some are more distressing and some pose a danger to your reputation.

In this chapter I’m going to talk about ways to spot some of the fakers, trolls, hackers and scammers, why they exist, and what you can do about them (if anything!)

Fakers

How to spot them

• incomplete profile, or random statements (see image below) • “women in bikini” avatars • profile goes somewhere strange • ratio of followers to following is less

than 1 • repeat tweets of the same content • promises to get you more follower

Here are more signs that an account is fake, and some tools to help you test whether your followers are fake. Unfortunately the creation of these accounts is getting smarter, and the bots behind the accounts have got better at mimicking human behaviour, even twitter can’t always spot them.

Why they exist

The accounts are most likely spam accounts, if you check the profile and the tweets all links published connect to the same marketing site.

It’s possible to buy followers on Twitter, it goes against the terms and conditions of using Twitter, but it’s possible. There’s even a site dedicated to reviewing the various services on offer.

The services are sold as social media marketing; which makes no sense if you’re building an audience of bots. The other sales rationale is that it boosts your online credibility. Well, perhaps, temporarily. Companies doing this often

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follow genuine accounts in the hope of follow backs to increase their credibility.

What to do

There’s no real risk with these accounts, your follower count is higher and if you follow back your stream has some pointless posts in it. So you can just ignore the accounts. I don’t follow back if an account looks like a spam account. From time to time I use unfollowers.me to identify any fake accounts I follow, and then I unfollow them.

Trolls

How to spot them

An internet troll has been defined as “an abusive or obnoxious user who uses shock value to promote arguments and disharmony in online communities”. You can spot them by their consistently mean and abusive comments, and their failure to back down or apologise when called on it.

Why they exist

A failure of evolution? The online world reflects the offline world, there are nasty people offline, you can expect them to also be online. Where anonymity is possible online some trolls use it as a shield to hide behind while they post abuse. Some platforms and some subjects are more famous for attracting abusive comments.

What to do

You have five options;

1 Ignore; Trolls thrive on your outrage, if you don’t provide it there’s a chance they’ll go away.

2 Respond; You can respond, challenging the person. It’s unlikely to change their mind or elicit an apology. It’s more like to earn you further abuse and others may join in, escalating it in round after round of competitive abuse.

3 Block; Twitter offers the option to block users, this means you will no longer see their content including tweets those which @ your handle.

4 Report; You can also report users to Twitter if you think their behaviour is abusive or threatening. If you think a threat of violence is credible you should contact your local police. In the UK this has led to arrest and prosecution.

5 Submit to Public Shaming; collect screenshots of the offending tweets to Public Shaming. It seems to generate plenty of backlash in its efforts to name and shame those who troll, or abuse others.

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Hackers

How to spot them

The scary thing is you might not know until it’s too late, be alert to any strange activity on your account including multiple password resets.

A week or so ago I noticed two very strange tweets, supposedly retweets by me, containing a script which mentioned tweetdeck.

I checked whether anyone else had seen this error and there were already a few tweets reporting a problem with tweetdeck, including one linking to a Mashable article. The good thing about sites like Mashable or Techcrunch is they will report real time on attacks and they have the expertise to analyse the problem and tell you what to do. At that point they were saying there’s been a hack on tweetdeck and advising users to logout. I did, reverting to using twitter through the twitter site, where I checked the tweetdeck twitter account. They were already reporting on the issue.

Why they exist

The hackers want to steal your money, your identity or destroy your reputation. Alternatively they want to blackmail you. Sometimes they want to cause damage a the company by stealing data, and you have the bad luck to hold an account there. Or they could be looking to blackmail a company.

What to do

What you can do comes down to prevention and staying alert.

Prevention; secure your accounts with strong passwords, use different passwords for each site, and use two factor authentication whenever possible. Here are more tips to protect yourself (although there’s debate on whether changing your password really does help).

Stay alert; follow the twitter accounts of the tools you use, if you have doubts check reliable sources such as Mashable, TechCrunch and NakedSecurity. If you are attacked your actions depend on the attack. In the example I gave above from tweetdeck the advice was to log out of everything, when returning Tweetdeck advised a password change.

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Scams

How to spot them

There are the usual scams that promise easy money via work from home schemes, and there are those connected to phishing scams, there are those that spread malware.

They’ll often send you a tweet or a direct message with just a link, or they’ll make an outrageous claim in the tweet, “someone is spreading rumours about you” was around a couple of years ago.

Why they exist

The people behind them want to steal your money, your identity or destroy your reputation.

What to do

Don’t click on links in messages or DMs that you’re uncertain about. Don’t fill in any passwords ever unless the URL of the site in the top bar is what you expect, so https://twitter.com/ for twitter. There are more suggestions on protecting yourself here.

As for the hackers stay alert, pay attention to credible warnings, check Mashable, Techcrunch or NakedSecurity if you have concerns, they usually find out pretty early about any large attacks going on.

A final word

I’ve had a lot of fun using twitter, and I’ve connected to some pretty amazing people. For me it’s a way to find information and expertise, but there’s plenty of human interaction and humour there as well. I haven’t covered humour, parody accounts or memes in this guide but it amazes me how quickly they appear and how well they’re done.

I use twitter every day, for personal and professional reasons, and wanted to share what I’ve learnt so far. It comes down to this; keep your original purpose in mind and listen to your customers/followers, don’t be scared to try new things – and be prepared to adjust or abandon ideas that didn’t work. Finally – share what you learn, that’s what makes the twitter world go around.

Tweet me @changememe with your feedback or comments!

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