Paul "Pablo" Croubalian

7 years ago · 2 min. reading time · ~10 ·

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How to be a Twitter Bad Ass: #1 The Basics

How to be a Twitter Bad Ass: #1 The Basics

A while ago I wrote, “This is Not a Post, It's a Social Experiment.” The number of commenters that were inactive on Twitter surprised me. Scratch that. I wasn’t surprised. I was shocked.

True, combining the two is best for those who use the publishing platform. "Best used by" does not mean "only used by." If you update, post, or do anything at all on LinkedIn and/or beBee, adding Twitter to the mix will boost your efforts. 

Sometimes I wonder if my late adoption of social media is a curse or a blessing. If this case, it’s a blessing. Yes, I am late to the social media party. I do not have any preconceived notions about what the platforms are, were, should be or should have been.

I have no prior knowledge to weigh them against. I see them as they are now. I look at the social networks as tools, not toys. 

I’m taking them one at a time. Most I try, then ignore. Some I hang on to.

To be completely accurate, I’m hanging on to four platforms: beBee, Twitter, Medium, and LinkedIn. I find them the most useful. This is particularly true when used in conjunction.

Note: This post is not about what you must do. It isn’t even about what you should do. This post is about what I do. Take from it what you will.

Not braggin', just sayin'

I think I’m doing okay on LinkedIn. From a standing start in mid-March of 2015 through today, I have built a busy network of 1487 people. I have published 85 posts under my by-line, and another 39 for clients.

I started on Twitter in late-July. Right now, I have 7,831 followers. I had over 2000 followers after my first month. Follower growth is now organic.

My tweets have seen 472,726 impressions in the last 28 days. There have been 18,477 impressions in just the last 24 hours.

beBee / LinkedIn Strengths

I now use beBee as my hub. It’s my primary resource for connecting and communicating with people. I recently moved over from LinkedIn. Some people I've connected with have become clients. Some have become friends. A select few have become both.

On beBee and LinkedIn, I build relationships. These relationships are mutually supportive. Here, I engage with connections.

Call it “depth of connection.” 

Twitter is different.

You don’t need to know someone to follow them.  Twitter also has an accessible API (Application Program Interface). There are tons of 3rd party tools to help you work it. More on those much later.

Tweets only live for minutes or even just seconds. There is no algorithm to show you what you might like to see.

That’s both good and bad.

You don’t  get notified of a tweet. Following someone just means their tweets will appear on your feed.

Tweet feeds just zoom along. Mine runs at about 3200 tweets an hour. As one commenter said on that other post, that sounds like “content diarrhea.”

If you just tweet once, he’d be right. There are ways around that.

For now, let’s just call Twitter our “breadth of connection.”

Combine Twitter, beBee and LinkedIn

LinkedIn and beBee is our “depth of connection.” Twitter is our “breadth of connection.” Together they form the two sides of connection that we need. Neither does it on its own. Together they allow us to connect both deeply and widely, albeit not at the same time. 

I started using Twitter to promote my LinkedIn posts. Post promotion remains its primary purpose. I look at Twitter like I look at direct mail advertising. You need big and frequent distribution.

Good news. You can build that in a hurry. Better news, Twitter and Medium are connected. Your Twitter followers are also Medium followers. That assumes they are Medium members of course.

You already know how to work LinkedIn. This post, and a few others to follow, will focus on how to use Twitter to support piblishing, whether on LinkedIn or beBee.

The journey to 10,000 followers begins with a single one. Let's get ready for him or her.

Step One: Your Handle

Your handle (screen name) is your name on Twitter. Many of you have used Twitter for your personal stuff. That’s fine.

But...

ParteeGRRL71 is not suitable for business use. Make another account.

If your screen name is cryptic, no one will find you. It's not suitable either. Make another account.

Twitter will only allow one account per email address. You can create several email accounts. But, having many email addresses is a royal pain in the butt.

Here’s a hack.

Use Gmail. Gmail considers, “BobBSmith,” “Bob.BSmith,” and “Bob.B.Smith,” as being all the same email. Gmail ignores the dots. Twitter doesn’t.

Twitter will see these as three different emails. It will allow you to create three Twitter accounts from a single email.

So, ParteeGRRL71, make a new account. Call it JuneCleaver, or whatever your name is.

If you prefer to use something descriptive, go ahead. Deb Helfrich uses “InterviewMaven.”

To me, that’s a mistake (Sorry, Deb). It makes her harder to find. There’s another handle on Twitter, “deb_helfrich.” It’s inactive, but it confused me. At first, I followed that one.

Add your Twitter screen name to your LinkedIn and beBee profiles. 

Step Two: Your Profile

This may sound obvious. Make your Twitter profile like your other profiles. Here’s my Twitter profile page. https://twitter.com/PaulCroubalian

I use the same profile picture as I do here on beBee and on LinkedIn. I use a different header image. The different header image is because more of it shows on Twitter than on LinkedIn.

The header image should be 1500 pixels by 500 pixels. You profile picture should be 400X400, but it will display at 200X200. The profile picture overlaps the header. Play with it a little until you like what you see.

Your profile description should give me a hint about why I should follow you. This is not a time to get cryptic or poetic. Be clear about what you do and who you are.

You have just a little time to convince me I should follow you. 

You don't have a lot of room here Consider your words carefully.

Step Three: Get your “Follow on Twitter” on

Get ready to start letting people know that you have that spanking new account.

There are ways to embed tweets. Embeds are like the EasyTweet below. From there, anyone on Twitter can follow, like, or retweet. They're great, but they can't be used everywhere. We’ll get to that hack in another post.

For now, let’s do it the easiest way. It works everywhere. All you need is a simple URL, a link. You can add that link to an image, or to text. You can add it to your email signature. You can add it to your posts. 

The format is simple. Here’s mine.

https://twitter.com/intent/follow?screen_name=PaulCroubalian

This URL says: Open twitter.com. Find and run the intent called follow. The value of the screen_name variable is PaulCroubalian.

Swap PaulCroubalian with your screen name and you have your own follow link. Try it in the comments so I can follow you.

That’s one of Twitter’s strengths. It includes a nice selection of web intents. With web intents, you can build custom tweet links. They can be a pain to write, so I made a spreadsheet that writes them for me. I'll get to that spreadsheet in a future post.

For example, consider the following URL:

https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text="Is Your Awesome Content Creeping People Out?"&via=PaulCroubalian&url=http%3A%2F%2Flinkd.in/1K7lnWG&hashtags=ibeacons,howiwrite

This is an URL that, when clicked, will tweet “Is Your Awesome Content Creeping People Out?” It will attribute the post to me, and add the link to the post. Finally, it will include the hashtags #ibeacons and #howiwriteTry it here.

That's just a peek into what you can do when you use Twitter to support LinkedIn.

This post is already getting waaaaay too wordy. Next time we’ll dig into how to build a targeted following in record time.

In the meantime, get this stuff together so you can come out swinging next time.

Ghosts that Write Hive: Get Writing Help from Pros

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