TomTravel2

The Twitter Trick

If you’ve been tweeting for a while, you have seen DMs, profiles and posts kindly offering to share “The Twitter Trick” or some such nonsense. After following one such link to a dead-end page with a video and a form for my email etc, I lost all interest in a few seconds. I am not a big fan of anything “auto” on Twitter. If I DM you, @ you, or tweet anything  you can be assured that I am doing it manually.

Everything I have done on Twitter is personal. I have sought out people with common interests and common geography to follow. I have chosen not to follow people who are out for a quick buck or a quick bazzillion followers. I have responded to people who @ me, retweet me, and #followfriday me. I have tried to put my personal touch on my tweets even when I am posting the travel news.

Slowly at first, but with growing momentum of late, I have built a good size following. The most important part to me is that I am now connecting with people I want to connect with. Many share a common field of work in the travel business. Many are people who love to travel and looking  for news and insight. Some are in website design, SEO and SEM which are my means to the end of connecting with travelers. Some are Twitter experts who I learn from daily. Some live like I do in the AZ particularly the Valley of the Sun or Phoenix metropolitan area.

“My Twitter Trick”

All in all, “My Twitter Trick” has worked for me. Since I am not out to get as many followers as I can, but rather out to build a quality community I want to interact with, I call it a success! I will lay out the particulars of what I think the Real Twitter Trick is:

Interact, respond, entertain, inform, inspire, and play nice.

Interact

If you are not on Twitter to interact, go home. Twitter is not a broadcast medium, I repeat, Twitter is not a broadcast medium. If you treat it as such you are doing more harm than good to your image, your brand, and your reputation.

Respond

If you are asked a question, answer it. If you receive a comment, reply. Join in the conversation. Better yet, spark up a conversation of your own. Find people with common interest and shoot them a question or comment. Then be ready to respond again. Search your @ replies daily and let people know you see their tweets. Thank those who #followfriday you. Give out #followfriday shout outs of your own, and include people with whom you have interacted.

Entertain

Throw me a bone! Make me smile, make me laugh, make me groan, or make me spray coffee out my nose and I will follow you to the ends of the tweet stream. If something strikes you as amusing I might like it too. Tweet it out there! Many of my most retweeted tweets have had a good dose of humor in them.

Inform

Tell me something I don’t know. I learn something new every day. Now that I am on Twitter, I learn dozens of new things every day. I look for articles or blogs that have something unique in them to link. The “same old, same old”, is not going to get as good a response as the “no kidding” or the “I didn’t know that.”

Play Nice

If someone does something nice for me such as retweeting or giving my tweet a thumbs up, I try to find a way to do something nice for them. I also try to generate random acts of niceness whenever I am tweeting. If I see something I think is of value chances are someone else will gain value if I retweet it. I will do this for any tweet even if I don’t know the tweeter. If I see some one playing nice I will thank them for it.

If you have the urge to play badly restrain yourself. Twitter is a dangerous place to engage in a flame war. Insulting people will get you nowhere fast as many have learned to their dismay.

I hope you like “My Twitter Trick.” Take for a spin and see how it drives for you. I’ll be tweeting you!