How to Use Twitter and Not Waste Your Time Pt. 1

Twitter is the best new form of personal marketing available. I often get strange looks from friends and acquaintances when I say this, but it is true. Here is how I believe best used for non-trivial purposes:

1. Follow people who have meaningful and pertinent things to say. If you are sports fan, follow the players you like, the sports writers who have interesting blogs and the teams you are a fan of. If you are a lawyer, search for other lawyers in your practice area or that are local. Try searches related to you practice area to see what people are saying about it and "tweet" about current topics or topics that are missing.

2. Be a person who people want to follow. How to do this? Make meaningful and pertinent posts. I always try to include a link to an interesting article in my "tweets", so that there is always more content per tweet than the 140 characters.

3. Know and use the lingo. Use hash marks (#____) and re-tweets (RT @username) to generate buzz about what you are saying. The # symbol before a keyword create posts that term to sites like http://twitter.com/hashtags , http://www.hashtweeps.com/ and http://www.tweetscan.com/ . Re-tweeting is like amplifying another person's signal, sending the original person's tweet to all your followers. If you like someone's tweet, it is good twitter etiquette to retweet it with "RT @username" before the post. More on that here: http://bloggingbits.com/the-art-and-science-of-retweeting-for-twitteraholics/

To be continued....