Notes on Composing a Twitter Stream

I’ve tried a variety of things over the last four months concerning the composition of my twitter stream.  There are many ways to go about this and your specific goals will determine how useful any of the following suggestions are, but now that a consistent practice is emerging for me, seems like it’s time to give it away.

If you were to follow CCSeed’s Twitter practice suggestions, you’d:

• Always remember you are in a public space, and you probably should think twice if what you are about to post wouldn’t come out of your mouth standing in line with strangers at the grocery store.
• Do your best to consider each tweet as a creative opportunity.  Micro yes, boring no.
• Know your talking points and engage folks in them regularly.  You need to keep pitching the tent for the conversations you want to make happen.
• The business of art or the art of business: know you are creating an identity which is getting introduced to new people everyday.  Consider what are the essential aspects of that identity, and make sure your twitter stream contains those markers or guides every day.
• Tweet interesting quotes (for instance I quote Jung, Einstein and the poet Ed Dorn).  This is a great way to engage folks for the first time.
• Do your best to respond to all replies.  (Not needed with auto-generated DM’s from new followers).
• Give your expertise away.
• Don’t be afraid to jump into a thread without an invitation if the topic suggests your input would be useful.  Jumping in to be clever tends to flop.
• You need to get to know people, so pay attention to the streams of others and respond to what happening over there as well.
• Don’t forget to tweet the answer to the original question “what are you doing?” The art of conveying the commonplace is not a throw away task.
• Ask questions that are open invitations that will allow anyone to respond.
• Every so often go on a tweet frenzy.
• Weave your other social media activity into twitter with links. Consider a rhythm for sharing content. Note, I use the following to generate automatic links into the twitter stream:
  • photos to twitpic
  • comments through backtype
  • google shared items, feed to friendfeed and then posted to twitter
• Offer links to your blog posts.  Note how far down the list this comes, though perhaps the most effective item to accomplish your goals.
  • I tend to share a blog link first with someone who I know will find it relevant, then a little later follow that with a straight up “title to the blog post with link.”
  • I do not share links to every post.  Better posts, meaning broader appeal, I’ll share in the morning and at night.  (When Brogan called Catskill Cottege Seed eclectic, he had a point).
• Nothing to share, share nothing.
• Retweet great tweets, or the links to great content from others.
• Use DM sparingly, when it really should not be public.  You can pitch ideas in DM, or offer personalized gratitude for support.  If it’s used sparingly, when you do use it, people will likely notice.
• I’ve seen others do amazing things with news items, both reporting and re-distributing, just not my cup of tea: and speaking of tea: food and weather, just like in real life, are great ice breakers.
• Review your stream, read it like a short story or one act play, perhaps an extended poem.  Then ask what’s missing?  Another strategy for this is to view your tweet cloud at Tweetstats.

Finally, I’ll close with the following distinction: are you a broadcaster or a social media practitioner.  If the later, then follow everyone back.

So here’s some space, please add to this till your heart’s content…