If you’re serious about getting the most out of the micro-blogging platform Twitter – by building credibility, and in turn an audience, it might be time to review how you go about it.
1. Have a hook, a USP, a reason for people to want to be interested in what you have to say. Chances are you are not a celebrity so you’re going to need to focus. Spell it out in your profile biography as these keywords will draw people towards you.
2. Content and context are king. Engaging, interesting and relevant content is critical on Twitter, especially if it is for business use. A carefully crafted line of copy and a shortened link to interesting content provides a number of benefits. It positions your interests and links you to other people and companies interested in that content. It forms common ground and creates opportunities to connect with other users.
The most interesting Twitter accounts predominantly share lots of engaging information they have sourced from others, some of their own content and occasionally some personal information or insights.
3. Pay it forward. Associating yourself with better known sources of great content by retweeting it and including the original creator in your tweet is a very powerful way of building a profile. This works not only for tweets and content you like, but also tweets and content that you want to be associated with from a business perspective. In much the same way as blog, news and article response is a credible way of driving traffic to your own websites and blogs, so to is ingratiating yourself with industry thought leaders through Twitter.
4. Pay it back. By adding that all important @ link to the original creator, you are acknowledging them and validating that content by sharing it with all your connections. Always credit a content creator as they have often spent a significant amount of time on a blog, video, infographic, white paper, ebook or whatever it is you are sharing.
5. Use hashtags. Sounds simple but do all your tweets contain hashtags? I’m as guilty as most for not adopting these all the time, but by adding a relevant tag such as #b2b or #seo or #marketingblog, you are giving your content the best opportunity to develop virally. The conference sector has picked this up and run with it at large scale conferences and exhibitions and there are a number of unofficial tags that often spring up around major TV and news events so tweets can be grouped together.
When these tags hit a high degree of take up, they become a trending topic which means a given subject is one of the most talked about at a given time.
Adopting these five techniques should draw more interest in your Twitter activity.
And whilst on the subject, I recommend you migrate your account to a free service like Hootsuite or Tweetdeck, simply because they offer more functionality and flexibility. I personally prefer Hootsuite as you can quickly and easily schedule and distribute messages and updates across all the major social networking platforms from the one place (more to follow in a post later this week).
Image Corbis
The Marketing Assassin 
Terrific informatio for the novice. Really trying to learn what type of social media is useful for my business…very difficult.