I have been defining and refining Twitter best practices for business for over a year and have spoken at many marketing conferences on this topic. I’ve ramped up over 40 Twitter accounts across multiple business categories and tweet from at least six to eight accounts every day.

I always say Twitter can be used any way you want. In fact, I tweet for some fictional characters (and won a Shorty Award for doing that), which is odd by most people’s standards. That said, however, if you’re using Twitter for BUSINESS purposes, there are definitely best practices you can follow to seed engagement and garner high-quality followers.

Without going in-depth on how to do that, my best advice is to treat your twitter stream kind of like your digital resume if you’re building your personal brand, or your marketing materials if you’re building an actual brand. Aim to tweet things that provide value for the greatest number of people (or delete tweets that don’t after recipients have received them). Thanking people publicly for retweets doesn’t generally meet that criteria, so I don’t advise it.

Plus, when you have thousands of followers it is unwieldy to thank everyone who retweets you – publicly or privately. I don’t do Follow Friday for the same reason. It’s easy when you’re a newbie, but just plain silly once you become a power user.

To me, it’s similar to using games and quizzes on Facebook. They seem fun when you’re a newbie, but after you have hundreds or thousands of friends, the dozens of invitations you get to participate in these things every day seems like spam.

Of course, if you have no business objectives for using these platforms, you can do anything you want with them.

@CarriBugbee
Social Profiles: http://bit.ly/CarriB

I agree that people should use twitter in a way that works for them, and everyone has different needs and goals so their uses will be different. But I also think that there are some main common points and recommendations that will help someone be a more valued part of the community. I think that posts that help those who are new to twitter understand how to best add value are great. And the same rule applies here: if you don’t want to know how to do that, you don’t have to read the post. Right?

Thanks!

Lots of folks disagree about the RT etiquette. It’s all relative, and I think we can decide for ourselves the line between politely returning the favor, and self-promotion. Thanks for your comments.

Thanks for reading, sharing your thoughts.

I really appreciate people like you who understand that there are other people in the world who may feel differently about things and rather than attacking them you wisely point out that we can choose who we want to associate with or not.

Thanks for your approach and insight!

Brian