18 tips for Twitter mastery

Advice to people not on Twitter:
JOIN then learn how to get the most out of it.

Advice to people already on Twitter.

1. Pick a topic to Tweet on and stick to that topic for that Twitter account


2. Consider having more than one account, maybe a busy one and a not-so-busy one


3. Complete the details in your profile to clearly show your interest in your topic


4. Choose very carefully who you follow


5. Unfollow anyone who is too noisy


6. Don't give away your religious or political preferences without reflecting on whether to show these things by who you follow


7. Don't follow noisy famous peole - look them up from time to time instead


8. Avoid following people who don't complete their profile or people who don't have web addresses


9. Follow people for a while then reconsider them.
   Maybe you would be better to follow one or two of their followers


10. Decide whether a person's followers are a better list to check


11. Decide each time whether to block any new followers


12. Block anyone who only ever has one message and keeps repeating it


13. Block any followers that follow lots of people and have few followers


14. Do not follow the links of people who follow lots of people and have few followers


15. Try to have more followers than people you follow


16. Try to have less updates than the people that you follow


17. Have a rule about time between updates - one per night?


18. Search a topic keyword before you post - what is known already?


19. Look at your own profile. Is it all retweets (RT) or responses? Try to vary between these and new postings.


20. Delete any of your updates that were a good idea at the time but that look out of place in your profile


21. Don't just plug your business.


22. Discuss articles on topics related to what you know. Only when people respect your opinion should you recommend product.


23. Think of the tweet as the ad for your blog posts


24. Hundreds of the right sort of followers are much better than thousands of rude video makers and spammers


25. Get the mood right. Start with a review of your profile.

Finally note that followers are listed in the order they followed. More recent ones are more likely to follow you back.
Winhelp.com.au as such is not on Twitter. We service two accounts on unrelated topics. From time to time we search for Help3 and related topics to keep abreast of changes in the industry.

Project Xanadu

Ted Nelson is the founder of Project Xanadu
Ted's thinking is in multiple contexts.
He has tried for years to introduce something better than a web full of broken links.

For example a xanadoc is represented as two lists: a list of content and a list of overlays
xanadu.com/xanasimp

Ted describes himself as a "Systems Humanist", thinking of the tapestry of information.

Quote from the TWIT TV interview: "Good UI; make some choices obvious, hide the other less common ones."

Triangulation interview 164:
More about Ted Nelson

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Nelson

Web Standard Design

TWIT TV Triangulation 63

Leo Laporte interviews Jeffrey Zeldman.
One of the first web designers, and pioneer of web standard design structure and behavior.

Don't feed the aggregators

Make your own business website. "Aggregators" make directories of similar businesses and give you a "page". This page is no substitute for your own site. Your own business site would not have a ready link to a competing business. So why are businesses feeding the aggregators?