5 Things I learned By Starting Twitter From Scratch

by Lily Bradic

I’ve been tweeting since 2009, and after attempting (and failing) to use the same Twitter account for personal and professional tweets, I finally decided to separate the two. If you’ve been meaning to join Twitter for a while, or already have an account gathering dust, here’s what you need to know to get through the first week:

​Nobody likes you when you have no friends

On the first day of running my “work” account, I set up Hootsuite, followed 21 people, completed my profile and retweeted things. When you have a few hundred followers, people tend to follow you back. When you have none, nobody cares. Perhaps this explains why over 75% of Twitter accounts are inactive — it's no fun when nobody wants to be friends.

The good news? There’s a kind of snowball effect. On day two, I got a follower. And then, within the hour, I had ten.

It’s easy to use the wrong account

I spent most of the second day following people from my personal account by accident. I tried using share widgets on various sites, and kept tweeting links as my personal account by mistake. When you’re already signed in, you don’t always get a chance to confirm your social shares.

The Hootlet extension is the way forward. Even if you’re signed into the wrong account on Twitter, Hootlet will always share links via the profile attached to your Hootsuite account.

People respond well to being acknowledged. Who knew?

If somebody follows you, say thank you! Say hi! Follow them back, if you think their tweets are interesting. This may get a bit exhausting after a while, so consider saving the greetings for the really interesting people (and potential influencers, of course.)

Use “all tweets” rather than “top tweets” to find followers

If you want to follow people who will follow you back, the “all Tweets” search filter is your friend. Otherwise, you’ll just get the top (often verified) accounts with a bunch of followers — and when their following-to-followers ratio is 1:10, your chance of getting a follow-back is pretty low.  Be warned, though  —  search “all” tweets for “social media” and you’ll have to scroll through a bunch of recruiters and/or kids talking about how glad they are their crushes don’t know their Facebook passwords. So, you do this:

(Words in picture are just an example. If you're not using "any of these words", you should really be using "none of these words". Other good words to exclude: lmao, hate, class, ignore, deleting).

It gets easier

After a week, I had around 200 followers, and people started to retweet things I posted. I also started to notice patterns, and was able to identify people who were more likely to follow or engage with me than others.

And, from observing, I also learned what not to do. A lot of people post big ideas without providing links to back them up — for example, “Use a call to action in your images.” If people don’t already know to do that, then they need to be told why, or they won’t absorb the information. Tweeting too much is another issue. People will notice if you show up too frequently in their feed. 

Ready to get started with Twitter? Follow DMG at @digmedghost for regular social media tips!

Image credit: Twitter