My Twitter account is over 10 years old. I set it up because I saw others at Microsoft (and were technical) who add an account. I also had a blog for 10 years on TechNet as an employee (it is gone now). There were years where I just experimented with Twitter (posting music that I played, places I visited, following others randomly over the years). At some point I hit 5,000 people I was following for one reason or another, but I didn’t have enough people following my account and Twitter forced me to start purging the accounts I was following to add others.
USE REAL INFORMATION
On Twitter you can provide all sorts of information to Twitter and then decide what information is public vs private. The more information is in your profile, the better people considering following you have to make a decision.
FOLLOWING and FOLLOWERS
Twitter has two concepts once you have an account (like other platforms) — following others and users that follow you. The nice thing about Twitter is you don’t have to follow someone to see their tweets (or posts). You can search by topic (or hashtags) to find anything posted about a particular topic. Because I ran into the following limitation, I found a tool that cleared a number of the people I was following for me (I didn’t want to unfollow thousands of people manually). These tools can be dangerous if your account is new on Twitter because certain types of automation are not allowed.
HASHTAGS
Using the pound (or number) sign before a word is an easy way to find information. I have used a few of these and even made up my own from time to time. There are a few rules I’ve discovered (like a hashtag can’t be all numbers or contain a hyphen or dash) — I discovered this when a Microsoft employee tried to use a hashtag for a Microsoft exam, which were traditionally all numbers with a hyphen or dash (70–073 was the first exam I ever took Implementing and Supporting Microsoft Windows NT Workstation 4.0, Exam 70–058: Networking Essentials was my sixth exam and earned me my first MCSE or Microsoft Certfied Systems Engineer at the time). #CLD277x is a new Microsoft course online and the most recent I have completed. Since it has letters and numbers (and no hyphen or dash), it’s a valid hashtag to have conversations around on Twitter.
TAKE SOME TIME TO DECIDE WHAT YOU ARE TRYING TO ACCOMPLISH WITH TWITTER
As a technologist and former Active Directory administrator, I learned the easiest time to categorise something is at the time it’s created (it’s easy to add everyone to a group as you add them, it’s much more difficult to do so afterwards in a medium to large organization). It’s even easier if you can get users to assist with the process (if you want everyone to be in a group and they join or someone in a department adds everyone he/she works with, it’s easier than one person trying to figure all this out AND enter it. This is the last lesson I’ve learned with Twitter.
ORGANISE YOUR FOLLOWERS INTO LISTS
The easiest time to setup lists (either at a high level or very granular) is when you are adding someone or when you find someone. These lists can be just for you (private) or public. Public lists allow you to subscribe to them and then view everyone that is a member of the list instead of everyone you have ever followed for any reason. How cool would it be to see only people that have a common interest as you (your favorite band, a movie, technology, etc.)? You don’t just see their posts related to a particular topic (that’s where hashtags are helpful), but you are only seeing information they publish.
