When taking your first steps towards using Twitter as an online marketing tool, it’s important to have good Twitter etiquette. The bottom line is that Twitter is all about interacting with other users and building trust. If you use your account to do nothing but talk about and link to your business, you will be seen as a spammer. But if you engage in conversations and use the service as a real person — the voice of your company — you will build trust and earn respect.

How to Use Twitter: DON’T…

• Don’t just post links to your website. You’ll sound like a robot and people will think you’re a spammer.
• Don’t only talk about your company.
• Don’t tell every detail of your day or give too much information.
• Don’t use foul language or insult competitors or Twitter users who have said something negative about you or to you.
• Don’t post links to anything NSFW (not suitable for work).
• Don’t ignore people who @reply to you.
• Don’t ignore @replies.
• Don’t forget to use search.twitter.com to look for mentions of your company or name
• Don’t use search.twitter.com to look for people talking about your industry and spam them with an @reply.
• Don’t follow many more people than are following you — keep a good ratio. Use friendorfollow.com to find out who isn’t following you back. (If you’re following lots of people and not many are following you, this makes your account look spammy.)
• Don’t use a tool to send new followers an automated Direct Message.
• Don’t follow a bunch of people at once, especially right when you sign up. Build up your profile slowly. It takes time and patience.
• Don’t get political unless it’s a major part of who you are or who your company is. Potential customers or clients could make the decision not to use your services based on any political statements you make.

How to Use Twitter: DO…

• Make sure you have an avatar.
• Use search.twitter.com or Twitterhawk to look for mentions of your company or name.
• Add people who have mentioned your company or name on Twitter, then send them an @reply that says something like “Thanks for the mention!”
• Post links to your new blog posts and other news, but keep it to a minimum.
• Post at least once per day. Space your posts out — don’t just post one after the other.
• Interact with people who are following you. Build up a rapport.
• Keep your posts to under 140 characters — don’t post twice in a row because you have so much to say about one thing.
• Use your Bio to let people know who you are and why you’re here.
• Fill out the homepage URL field in your profile with your website.
• Retweet (RT) links and Tweets you find interesting and relevant to your industry. The user you RT’d will appreciate it — this is the highest form of Twitter flattery.
• Think before you Tweet. If you mess up, many of your followers will have software that automatically downloads posts, and they will still be able to read your deleted post.
• Use Direct Messages when you need to send someone a private message.
• Use tinyurl.com or is.gd to shorten long links.
• Be interesting.
• Most importantly–Have fun with it!

Happy Tweeting!

Twitter is Down. I’m getting a 500 internal server on Twitter, and my twitter finger is starting to twitch. I’m not really sure what to do now … just sort of sitting here staring at the screen … Do I call the police? The National Guard? Barack Obama?

Twitter Having a Ruby on Rails Scalability Problem?

Theories abound around here of why Twitter is down, though the prevailing one is that it’s Ruby, and that from our Ruby on Rails programmer. There is an inherent Ruby on Rails scalability problem, and it’s causing me, and millions more jittery twitters some unease.

“Twitter is Down” Timekiller

Ok, since Twitter is down, and you might have some time to kill, why not comment here on one of these questions:

1. Why is Twitter down?
2. What do you do when you can’t Tweet?
3. What horrible worldwide implications will the Twitter outage have?
4. What will we do if Twitter never comes back up?

… what’s that? Twitter’s back up now? um … ok, gotta’ go now, you can catch me on my Twitter about SEO, but you feel free to hang around here and answer the poll