Note: First, let’s celebrate the fact that Alex Jones just got kicked off Twitter forever and ever, which means he’ll be screaming into the void for a long time. Praise the gods. Now onto the meat of this post.
Listen: the advice you see on the Series of Tubes isn’t just bad. All too often, it’s seriously, tragically wrong.
Good info is quickly outdated, especially if it’s about social media.
Even if you do your due diligence–say that three times fast–and read seven different articles about best practices, it may not help.
Whatever article you read will typically be one of three things: (a) conventional wisdom, meaning it’s standard fluff which will get you standard, meh results, (b) bland instruction-manual drivel that won’t help you unless you’re hopeless with technology or (c) some kind of smooth come-on pivoting to a pitch for you to spend $199 on an app or service that promises the moon.
I’m not selling anything.
HOWEVER: I love Twitter, despite its flaws. Nothing is better for learning about breaking news, exploring your favorite niche and making friends.
So let’s talk smack.
1) Don’t treat Twitter like Facebook
Facebook is for friends and family you already have. You don’t take friend requests from 5,492 strangers on Facebook because hey, I’m not letting those people see family photos and all that. There’s a higher barrier to making connections.
Twitter is like a friendly bar where the drinks are always free.
The barriers are low to non-existent. I don’t risk or lose anything by making new connections.
Posts that make sense on Facebook don’t work on Twitter and vice versa.
Facebook is about memories and moments and relationships. Good posts are timeless.
Twitter is about now now NOW, and tweets have an incredibly short half-life. (Note: HALF-LIFE 3 is never happening. Valve simply enjoys teasing and torturing you, and they’ll keep doing it forever.)
On the Book of Face, it’s fine to share personal moments–though don’t get too TMI and become Complainy McComplainface–because your friends and family already know and care about you. So yeah, the clip of your daughter tasting ice cream for the first time is hella cute.
On the Twitter, people will wonder why some dude with Yoda as their avi is putting up shaky video of their labrodoodle puking up two pounds of Easter chocolate on the living room rug.
2) Facebook a little, tweet a lot
You could post on Facebook a couple times a week, or once a day, and nobody would bat an eye. Pretty normal.
Once a month and people will wonder if you’ve gone into hiding.
If you posted on Facebook five to ten times a day, people would start avoiding you like that neighbor who always comes over to chat and won’t escape after an hour of yakking about something you don’t like or understand, like cricket.
The rules are reversed for Twitter.
Post once a day and most people won’t see the post.
Post once a week and congratulations, you’ve invented an invisibility cloak. Patent that thing.
Twitter feeds scroll by crazy fast. Unless somebody follows you, or the hashtags you’re using, and is online THAT VERY SECOND, they won’t see your post. (This is true even though Twitter changed its algorithms to be more like Facebook so your absolute besties on Twitter will see your stuff more often with the IN CASE YOU MISSED IT shebang. However, 99 percent of people will not see your posts unless they’re staring at the screen right that second, which is not happening. The math starts getting cray cray. Say you have 2,000 followers. It’s a good bet maybe 200 of them, max, will say any random tweet you post. Then we get into the standard ratios: If 200 people see it, 20 will actually read it and 2 will respond.)
It’s smart to tweet five or ten times a day. No problem. Because even then, only a minority of your followers will even see it.
3) Forget the usual advice on who, and how, to follow
Conventional wisdom goes like this: figure out hashtags for things you love, or whatever your niche is, and follow scads of people with that hashtag in their bio.
No.
Here’s why this doesn’t get the job done: (a) you’ll miss a ton of people who post to that hashtag and skip having it in their bio, (b) you’ll wind up following an army of zombie twitter accounts of people who have your hashtags in their bio but haven’t tweeted since 1977, and yes, I know Twitter didn’t exist, this is a Dad Joke, just go with it and (c) most of the live accounts you do follow with that hashtag won’t be that active.
Who do you want to follow?
Not just people who care about your special niche, whether it’s Hand-Stitched Hats for Cats or novels about Men in Kilts and the Women Who Love Them.
You want interesting people in that hashtag who are huge fans or experts. You want people who are actually on Twitter a lot, and not as lurkers, but chatterbugs. And you want people who are friendly and take the time to talk with other people, not just use Twitter as a vehicle for self-promotion.
Instead of the hashtag bio thing, this is what you do: Search for a keyword (doesn’t have to be a hashtag) or phrase in the Twitter search box. Look through the most recent tweets about that subject and follow people who are tweeting about it, and talking to each other, RIGHT NOW.
That way, you know it’s not a zombie account. You know if they’re actually having conversations with other people or just pumping out content.
Then follow the friendliest people who like talking about what you love.
4) Never troll, and never feed the trolls
Let’s say somebody invited you to their home for a party. They’re providing the food and wine. You just have to show up.
And let’s say you told them their house is too small, their Ford Explorer sucks and their kids are ugly. You’re gonna get kicked out of the party. Maybe punched in the face.
Sure, being a troll can get you attention. The wrong kind of attention.
There’s a difference between being famous and being infamous.
Still, you’ll run into plenty of trolls on Twitter and other corners of the Series of Tubes, and there’s only one strategy that works.
Ignore them.
No matter what they do or say, never, ever respond. Not once.
Blocking them is fine, because you never have to deal with their nonsense.
Muting them is far more evil and enjoyable, since they’ll keep shouting into the void and won’t understand why you’re an unmovable rock. Why they can’t provoke you, no matter how insane they get.
Mute away. It’s pure torture for trolls.
Also, what Ken M. does isn’t really trolling. He’s a derp, and plenty funny.
5) Retweet, respond and comment 80 percent of the time
With the Book of Face and other platforms, if you’re only posting a few times a week, or once a day, it’s fine to use that one shot to say the thing you really need to say. Go ahead and post that video of Sue Bird losing her mind in the fourth quarter and hitting threes from downtown Tacoma, or put in a link to your latest blog post.
On the Twitter, try to retweet, respond and comment four times for every other thing you say. (Yes, the math works out. Four-to-one works out to 80 percent. I didn’t even bust out the calculator, that’s how certain I am.)
Because like I said earlier, Twitter is like a bar where the drinks are free. There’s nothing friendlier than liking, retweeting and commenting what other people post. And there’s nothing more self-absorbed and lame than only talking about yourself. Wouldn’t fly in real life, even if we were actually in a bar and had done six shots of really good tequila in the last two hours when you said, “Enough about me. What do YOU think about me?”
And that’s the final lesson. All media, including social media, goes back to a basic rule of rhetoric: it’s not about you.
It’s never about you.
It’s always, always about your audience.
The Red Pen of Doom 