Twitter 102: Twitiquette for Veterans

4/11/2012

Now, you know the basics and understand Twitter lingo. It’s time to take a deeper look into the culture of Twitter. In this post, you will learn the basis of Twitter netiquette, or Twitiquette. Before we delve into Twitiquette, first decide if your account will be professional or personal. This will dictate how you interact with other people, and determine what information you tweet.

Twitter Netiquette

Be aware of how often you tweet. If you tweet 10 times every hour, your followers might be frustrated to see that much information in their Twitter feed. Try to tweet a few times each day, or every other day
Say “thank-you” to retweets. If a follower retweets something of yours, it is a courteous gesture to follow-up with a quick thank-you. This shows your follower that you appreciate the interaction, and it strengthens your community
Acknowledge to @ replies in a timely manner. You do not have to respond to a tweet every second. Try to take no more than 24 hours to respond. This shows your audience you are active on Twitter, and you want to communicate with your community
Keep to your topic or purpose. If you are interested about information technology or resources for veterans, tweet about those topics often. You will soon develop a follower-base that will look for those tweets
Avoid continuous retweeting and greetings. You do not have to retweet everything in your feed. You will have an access amount of information and nothing new to share. Also, avoid saying “hello” and “goodbye” each time you log in and out of Twitter. Don’t be afraid to be original
Be aware of how you use #hashtags. The use of hashtags is a helpful way to tweet about a specific topic, but limit how many you use in each tweet. If you use multiple hashtags in each tweet, your followers might become confused. Be specific, and target the right community
Keep in mind the 140-character rule. Try not to abbreviate every other word in a tweet. Twitter is meant to host short, but powerful tweets. Look at how you compose a tweet, and delete unnecessary information
Be open and conversational. Ask questions, tweet interesting links or articles or comment on a follower’s tweet. Contribute information to a conversation
Take advantage of URL shortening services (shortens a link, but will direct followers to the right page). If there is a web link you want to tweet, copy and paste the link into one of the following URL Shortening Services:

-Bitly

-Goo.gl

-TinyURL

This post is part of a blog series of how to use social media to search for jobs and market yourself online. Look for the next post about how to use Twitter to search for jobs and how to build and engage an online community.