Helpful for anyone just starting out with Twitter. :)

Each social network comes with its own quirks, and people make little mistakes all the time. This doesn’t really matter too much for a personal account, but for an organisation’s account it’s more important to get it right and make the most of the opportunity Twitter presents. With this in mind, here’s 3 surprisingly common mistakes institutions and individuals make (even experienced Twitter users) because of a lack of in-depth understanding of Twitter’s quirks. This is how to avoid no-can-do DMs, follower-excluding @ replies, and chaos-causing hashtags.

1. Asking for people to DM you
2. Excluding most of your followers with an @ reply
3. Creating a hashtag which is already in use

Great tips—I see #2 with painful frequency.

(Source: twitter.com)

#libchat gets mentioned. :) I participate when I can, which hasn’t been very often lately…

If you’re new to Twitter, or if you’re not sure if you even want to give it a try, participating (or even just observing) a tweetchat is one of the best ways to see the professional possibilities that Twitter offers.

(Source: twitter.com)

This post illustrates some of the downsides of Twitter (and social media in general), particularly when there are disagreements between participants about what is acceptable behavior. And text can leave a lot to be desired in terms of conveying intended meaning and emoticons and LOLs only do so much.

Personally, I’m pretty careful about what I say when it’s not directly work-related because I put my Twitter handle on my resume and I don’t want stuff I said on the internet to be the reason I’m not considered for a job. (Particularly since I am actively searching for a new position right now—only three more months until my contract ends!)

(Source: twitter.com)

A few great pointers especially for those starting out on Twitter (e.g. upload a picture!).

(Source: twitter.com)

1) Launching a Private Social Media Account
2) Having a Disproportionate Follower:Following Ratio
3) Writing Updates That Are Too Long
4) The Airing of Grievances
5) Talking Smack About Competitors
6) Making Off-Color Comments
7) Publicly Solving Customer Service Issues
8) Hijacking Hashtags
9) Piling Your Tweets With Too Many Hashtags
10) Insulting Your Customer Base
11) “Targeting” Poorly With Automation
12) Posting WAY Too Frequently
13) Retweeting Instead of Generating Original Content

I have two comments:

2) My library cannot possibly follow as many people as follow us (we have nearly 13,000 followers and there’s concerns about following being taken as endorsement… we don’t presently have a policy, so I play it very safe in who that account follows.)
12) The example on this one isn’t very good.

(Source: twitter.com)

Some good thoughts on what to do (and what not to do) when tweeting for a library.

A few of my opinions vary, but my library also isn’t a public library, so by necessity some of my practices are different. :)

1. Channel
2. Content
3. Community
4. Conversation
5. Candidness
6. Counted
7. Commitment

(Source: twitter.com)