One Hour to Conscious Tweeting

This article is for people who are committed to conscious living, have a full schedule, and want to start using Twitter effectively and quickly. My goal is to get you fully launched in one hour. If you want to spend an optional hour in a later session to become more advanced, there are some tips for that as well. To keep your launch session to an hour, stick to the suggested time limits.

1) Create a Twitter account at http://www.twitter.com Use a short name (preferably your own), fill out your profile and add your picture. Use key words (“psychotherapist” “author” “social media”) that will identify you to the right audiences in your One Line Bio. Listing key nouns is an effective way to summarize your bio and connections. If you don’t have a picture, Tweeters will not take you seriously and will not follow you, so add immediately. (5 min.)

2) Learn the basic Twitter protocols – As a compressed medium for communication, Twitter uses a lot of shorthand. Read this short overview of the story of Twitter and basic shorthands and protocols for Tweeting. (3 min.)

3) Start following people. Until you follow others, you are invisible – around 50% of people will follow you back, which then builds you a network. Without a network, Twitter is not very valuable. The goal is to follow people you know, who you find interesting, or are like-minded in your niche. First step is click on the “find other people” tab and go to “find on other networks," which allows you to import a list of your contacts in a few steps to find out who is on Twitter. Just checking “follow all” is easiest. You can then scan Twitter’s “suggested users” for people they recommend (heavy on celebs, but useful). Remember you can always “unfollow” in the future, so it’s better to follow too many at the beginning and scale back. (10 minutes)

4) Find other like-minded tweeters – I have assembled a Shift List of 80 inspiring conscious leaders, authors, and visionaries on Twitter. The fastest way to follow all these folks is to go to Shift List and follow instructions or to subscribe to it as a List via a single click . The Twibes.com site is a good way to find others in your areas of interest (such as “photography” or “green”) and we have a Shift Movement twibe of more than 700 you can use to find conscious people. Next, I would recommend following 10-20 hard-core Twitterers (usually have a high volume of posts), who often aren’t as prominent in the world but have mastered the medium, and offer great recs of people and resources to follow. Try WeFollow for top tweeters by category or network builders such as @thecitizen or @greengirls (green) @brightmichelle or @superspiritgirl (spiritually oriented). Look for people with 1K or more followers (key that they have more followers than following). Here’s a list of 77 top green tweeters and an article for the "Ultimate List" that includes dozens of these "best of" lists (1000 recs altogether). You can also look at who some of the people you respect most follow. Also, everyone should follow @mashable to get top articles, recs, and tips about Twitter and using social media. I suggest rapidly following 100 or more people right out of the gates in the first session using the above tips, remembering you can later “unfollow” those that you don’t enjoy. (30 minutes)

5) Read some of the Tweets of those you’re now following – the point here is to just get a flavor for the kinds of things people are tweeting about without going too far down the rabbit hole or becoming just a passive reader. (5 minutes).

6) Start tweeting yourself – Don’t wait to do this since the key to Twitter is offering VALUE. Start tweeting in your first session after the above steps since people won’t follow people who haven’t posted much. So think of 3-4 quick messages in different categories. For example, something interesting you’ve done in the last 24 hours, a link to an article on the web that you found inspiring (use http://bit.ly to shorten the address), and a question about what you’d like to connect around on Twitter. Spend 1 minute or less on each: be spontaneous, authentic. (5 minutes)

7) Retweet – people like it when others retweet their tweets, so read through the list of recent tweets from people you are following, find something you think is important or useful, copy it, paste in your update window prefaced by “RT @theiraccount” and hit send. Soon this will be a universal, automatic feature on all Tweets, which will speed it up. Do this with a handful of people’s quality Tweets but don’t overdo it since part of the task (and joy) is creating your own value. This starts to build connection with others since they will see you on their @ tab. (2 minutes)

Later session (optional - one hour)

8) Study someone who uses the medium very well to see how they use it. It’s interesting to go back over a whole week or more. I prefer someone who is not a celebrity and who doesn’t follow tons of people but has built a sizable base from quality Tweeting. Robin Sharma is a perfect example. (10 minutes)

9) Respond and initiate conversation – go to the @replies tab to see if anyone included you, as an “@stephendinan.” Respond to them with the arrow button to the right of the tweet. Engagement builds connection, even if it's only a few words. You can use the same format to send public messages to the people you like and respect most, responding to their tweets, questions, ideas, etc. This can build a direct pipeline to top CEOs, authors, etc. (15 minutes)

10) FollowFriday – is a weekly tradition for recommending people of interest and it’s the best way to find others to follow in your niche. I recommend searching for #followfriday and whatever other keywords interest you, which allows you to find good recs of people to follow in your space. Example: #followfriday green. Recommending others via #followfriday is a great way to build bridges. (10 minutes)

11) Search for keywords of interest to you to see who might be out there writing about similar things and thus other interesting people to engage. (10 minutes)

12) SocialOomph– I recommend setting up an account here, which allows you to space out quality tweets over the course of the day and plan in advance. Most tweets are also seen in the first five minutes of posting, so posting in the middle of the night is not helpful. Personally, I find this produces higher quality tweets because I can think more deeply, often away from the computer about what I want to share. For people with busy schedules, you can write up some useful Tweets in one session each week and spread them out, which doesn’t prevent you from also doing spontaneous ones each day. Schedule sends for regular biz hours for maximum visibility. You can also add an auto-responder when people follow you. (15 minutes)

After launching, think of Twitter as something you jump onto for 5-10 minutes up to a few times each day that will eventually build a global base of interesting people who know about you and your work and offer targeted information to you. Don’t overpromote your own stuff but try to offer real value with each tweet and you’ll build a good network. You can go far deeper, but that’s sufficient to start building value.

For the more spiritually-inclined, here’s an article I wrote about what I see as Twitter’s deeper purpose, and the story of how Twitter can be used for philanthropic purposes such as spreading peace.

Happy Tweeting! And please also follow me @stephendinan - I offer lots of resources for shifting our culture forward.