I make no claims to being an expert but hopefully my toddler steps may help some others to learn from my journey.

I’ve had a twitter account for about a year, but I frankly didn’t get it.  Why would I want to be  inundated with the minutiae of other people’s lives? And I couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to hear about mine!  I spent most of last year getting to grips with the secrets of ordinary blogging and it took up most of my online time, so micro-blogging seemed just a step too far.

However, I kept hearing from people whose opinion I respect that Twitter was important… I started dipping my toe in the ‘twater’ and it was a little like going to a party where everyone else was dancing a set of steps that I didn’t know. 

I then slowly realised that Twitter was a bit like your own personal broadcasting system, enabling you to share small snippets of information and thoughts.  However, it is pointless having the world’s best broadcasting kit if no one has any radios that are tuned to your station! 

So for this system to work you have to gain followers.  How do you do that?  You start by following others (in other words, do as you would be done by!).  If you are smart you will choose people who you are interested in; they can be personalities, colleagues, friends, people who share your interests.  So the first step of this dance is you will start receiving their ‘tweets’.  If you have chosen wisely these will contain bits that interest you and that you can respond to…. now the dance has begun.  You will soon find some of these people start following you.  Now you have some ‘radios’ tuned to your station.

If you want them to keep reading you need to add some value.  You have to be one or all of the following:-

• Interesting
• Yourself
• Genuine
• Useful
• Funny
• Helpful
• Provocative
• Newsworthy

I went on an Ecademy event this week that taught us more about this and one of the ‘secrets’ was that you gain currency by what you do for others rather just broadcasting your stuff.  This builds goodwill and hopefully they will reciprocate and start recommending your content to their followers.  Simple mathematics shows that if you have 200 followers and they each have 200 followers then potentially if they all forward (Retweet) your content to their followers your tweet suddenly has an audience of 40,000!  That is a powerful way to build a reputation and make some new relationships.  There is a random quality in this process that can being a little magic into your life.

Happy tweeting!

You can follow me on @RichardDerwentC