Twitter has become quite the power player lately.  And yet, sometimes it can seem more than a bit overwhelming. So how can you work with Twitter and actually make it bring results beyond “just” meeting interesting people?

It’s not all that different from the offline world, except that you have access to much larger numbers.

What to do?

Build relationships.  Meet cool people and establish a relationship with them.  Retweet their stuff, respond to what they ‘re writing about, etc.

Sell, but only a little.

Every dozen or so tweets, feel free to mention what you have for sale.  But otherwise, keep it helpful and/or friendly.

How to keep up with your friends?  Without fancy extra applications?

Respond to them or Favorite one of their posts.  That’ll help you find their name quickly.  Then click on their name and see what they chatted about recently.  If anything is something you can relate to, respond.

Even better, make lists!

Yep, that’s the secret of keeping track of the groups of people that are important to you.

You can make those lists public or private, as you please. So you can have a list for your offline friends, your favorite gurus, your favorite fellow low carbers, or whatever it is you’d like to make lists for.

And when you click on those lists, you see the stream of just those list participants. AND you can even click on List Members, and then you get all the list members individually, and can click on their names and see just THEIR lists.

Now that is cool

Another cool tool is “Favorites” – if you see something you like and that you might want to either respond to or retweet, just click on the little heart, and then you can look them all up under Favorites, quickly go through them and retweet the ones you want.

Why not retweet them right when you see them? Because a) you don’t want to retweet too many tweets all at once, and b) you want to retweet them during times when people are likely to see the retweets.

Of course, it helps if you have followers who actually are interested in the stuff you’re likely to talk about.  How to do that?

Be as clear about what you’re all about as you can. Provide value, i.e., tweet and retweet helpful stuff.

And find kindred spirits on Twitter and follow their followers (and maybe those they follow). You can build a list of kindred spirits in a big hurry.

Want more tips? Leave some comments… and I’ll write more 🙂

Elisabeth