If you know me, you know that I love Twitter. I have good reason to love it. It’s my library, news stand, water cooler, virtual conference reception and online pub (BYOB). I learn a lot, chat with interesting people and make friends. What’s not to love?
Usually when I tell people that, I get a dismissive face with this reply, “I just don’t get Twitter.” I’m not surprised, it can seem like a lonely pointless place with lots of noise until you figure it out. The key to success with Twitter is figuring out whom to follow and how to interact. I’ll dig deeper into that in an upcoming post, but until then I’ve recently found some posts that are well worth sharing. Here are some tips on following and interacting from Matt Silverman at Mashable, a great resource for basic social media how-to’s. When you’re done with that, read A Little Basic Twitter Advice for New or Inactive Peeps by Ray Beckerman.
I recommend becoming familiar with all the options in the Settings section of your Twitter account. How you set these options will either enhance or inhibit your Twitter experience. On the Account page of Settings many Twitter newbies make the mistake of checking the ‘Protect my tweets’ box. Here are ten reasons to not protect your tweets from Lee Aase.
I’ve noticed that some of my LinkedIn connections have their tweets automatically updating their LinkedIn account too. Maybe they’re doing this because they can, so why not. Or maybe it’s in the interest of saving time and they believe that all their tweets are the appropriate content for their LinkedIn connections. I don’t know. However, a lot of the tweets I see going to LinkedIn are more personal in nature compared to the usual professional LinkedIn updates, and they are certainly more frequent. My opinion only, but, damn, too much noise. Chris Brogan advises separating your LinkedIn and Twitter updates in Keep LinkedIn Clean.
If you’d like to follow your LinkedIn connections on Twitter but want an easy way to find them, Amanda O’Brien shows you how. My approach to these tools is that each of them has different audiences with whom you have different relationships, you may not want to send all your tweets to LinkedIn or to Facebook and vice versa. There are no rules but I would suggest considering your audience, message content and language before hitting ‘Send’.
July 8, 2010 at 10:09 am
Thanks Deirdre for mentioning the Social Media B2B article.
I also wanted to tell you that LinkedIn just added a new application that makes it even easier to find your LinkedIn Connections on Twitter. Here is their blog about it – http://blog.linkedin.com/2010/05/25/find-and-follow-your-linkedin-connections-on-twitter/
I also have to agree with you that my Twitter followers and LinkedIn network are pretty different. I am more comfortable finding LinkedIn connections who are on Twitter and following them, then posting all of my tweets to my LinkedIn update.
Everyone is different though and they should know their networks enough to know what people want from them where and when they are just being annoying.
Thanks for the post!
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July 8, 2010 at 11:05 am
You’re welcome, Amanda. Thanks for the LinkedIn post suggestion. You and I have the same thoughts about tweets on LinkedIn.
Since I get an RSS feed of my network’s updates — don’t always read it all but it’s a good way to know what’s going on with folks — I’ve hidden the updates of some who send their tweets to LinkedIn since it can get to be too much sometimes.
For any of you who might want to do that, here are the instructions on how to do that from LinkedIn:
1. Hover your mouse over the member’s photo box in a recent Network Update.
2. Hover your mouse over ‘Hide’ which appears in the top right area of the update.
3. Click on the ‘Hide (member name) from your Network Updates’ box that appears under ‘Hide’.
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