In this month’s issue of Publisher’s Weekly I wrote a piece titled "Creating Your Viral Loop on Twitter," all about how to market your book to the social web. But the advice applies to anyone who wants to market something on Twitter, from their services to their website.
From the piece:
1. Choose a Twitter name that’s searchable. It should be a literal representation of your digital brand, whether it’s your name or your company. This helps friends find you, and strangers define you. Prefacing a word with ‘@’ indicates a username and links it to a Twitter profile. For example, mine is @RachelSterne.
2. Add an avatar that represents you. Human beings naturally look for faces in social interactions, even if these faces might be logos or designs. Without an image, your feed will feel hollow. Add a link and description.
3. Pick your beat, and stick to it. Become an expert and add value by tweeting tightly focused industry news and insights—not mundane daily life. Check what your Twitter flock is interested in at TwitterSheep.com.
4. Pick your rhythm, and stick to it. Whether you’re prolific or concise, maintain your pace of tweeting so that followers don’t feel inundated or abandoned. Less is usually more.
5. Keep it positive. Studies have found that upbeat tweets are more likely to be retweeted, or repeated. Being positive also gives you a better brand identity.
6. Don’t cheat. Don’t mass-follow for reciprocation or use a paid service to gain followers. It’s obvious. The higher your ratio of followers to follows, the more credibility you establish: you are a leader.
7. Help people find you. Use hashtags, labels prefaced by ‘#’ that link your comment to an ongoing event or dialogues. Add yourself to a directory like @MrTweet.
8. Engage. Direct comments to others and use attribution with the @ symbol, a sort of virtual hat tip. Be controversial. Write in sound bites that resonate.
9. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. Make your tweets smart and compact to encourage retweets, the currency of Twitter. Use a URL shortener like bit.ly to avoid using up too many characters. When you package a great tweet, you’ve built your own viral loop.
Read the rest of the piece at Publisher’s Weekly.