This article is basically a summary of my encounter with social media – hence the title Social Media:First Frontier. I wrote quite briefly about my start in the blog post of Guy Kawasaki, but thought I could give a little more detailed information about how to start and how to getting ahead with twitter.
I will not call myself a Social Media Expert, but I consider myself an apprentice. Not because I don’t know to much about this topic, on the contrary – I’m the ‘biggest’ twitter in Norway in the aspect of amount of followers, and I have come to this position in just 60 days. I became a twitter the 19’th of November, and am now close to having 2000 followers – (missing 23 followers as we speak) – Does this make me an expert? I don’t know, but I do know how twitter works, and the whole point with twitter is.
The first encounter is the challenge to understand the concept behind twitter. To explain it quite simple – it is like a cocktail party, where you meet a lot of people that share the same interests, and other kinds of people you don’t have anything in common with – but that still can have some interesting things to say.
The first thing to do is to get some good people to follow. These can be Smores (social media whores – thanks for the definition @guykawasaki) or twitteraties/twitterleaders. These people have a lot of followers and some follow most of their followers and some follow just a few. But by clicking on their list of followers, you can find a lot of interesting people. You can also take a look at http://twittercounter.com – and look at the top 100 list.
If you follow some of these people and look at their followers, your off to a good start.
The next thing is to start «twittering» – share content, be personal, retweet from the people you follow and give back to the twitter community. This way, maybe someone finds what you are saying interesting, and will do the same to you.
If you want to find interesting things to tweet about, you can go to alltop.com, truemors.com, Stumbleupon.com, or other blogs you already have that inspire you and that you want to share with others.
You can use twitter as an personal meeting ground to interact with other people, or you can use it professionally to promote your blog, company, or product. I have some more thoughts about this topic, which I will give more input on in a later blog post. (hehe – can’t reveal everything at once)
In all simpleness – that’s it. Go out there – in the twittersphere and share and give as much as you can and feel like. Who knows, maybe you learn something – and maybe someone learns something from you. And the best of all – maybe you’ll get some friends around the world you’ll appreciate and care for in the future. I wish you all the best.
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True!
And I like the coctail party comparison (although I don’t frequent such parties very often I know what you mean
I am quite happy with the crowd I’m folloving right now, although I’m looking for more online media experts to follow.
The way I started out, was to find 15-25 tweeters whom I wanted to follow. Then I added Mr. Tweet to my Follow-list: http://www.mrtweet.net/ When Mr. Tweet responded I got a real kickstart.