This is probably the most important question about Twitter. Can you actually improve your networking using it? Yes you can! Don’t forget to check out the rest of the Twitter guide for creative people.
Here are 5 simple steps to start networking with twitter when you are a brand new twitter user:

1. Start building a presence outside of twitter

2. Browse websites in your niche and look for the twitter accounts of the people running those sites.

3. Check out the twitter accounts of those people, now it’s time to decide which people to add. As a rule of thumb, don’t add people who have more than 500 followers if you want to start interacting with them.

4. After adding them write an “@theirnickname I really dig your work and look forward following your updates, hopefully we can have some great conversations.” or something similar. Make sure your profile has a nice look and that your offline projects, in other means your website, speaks for itself. Edit: Kikolani made a great comment concerning this: “Be sure to not write the same message 50 times in a row, as you will look like a spammer using some kind of tool.” So be sure to use twitter naturally instead of making it an applied science.

5. Start interacting with those people on a regular basis, write replies to some of their messages that you have a genuine opinion on, retweet their stuff or promote their works. If you do everything right and share interests they will probably add you as a friend.

You can always go out and randomly add everyone you find, or use some tools to do this for you, but your networking powers will be pretty worthless. Twitter is a great tool to find like-minded people with whom you can chitchat every once in a while. Promoting yourself in twitter is a retarded way to approach twitter, as you will get far more quality followers in case you offer something unique and worthwhile out of twitter. Otherwise you are just one of those snake oil sellers who can talk to the other autofollow jerks who are polluting the twitterverse.

This part of “the Creatives Guide to Twitter” goes out to all the nay sayers. What on earth do you need twitter for? After all it’s just a little blue bird… You don’t have to use twitter, but it can help you promoting whatever you are doing. Here are a few Pro’s and Con’s to the use of twitter.

The Pros

• easy to connect with others
• great way to leverage your works
• increase your fanbase
• promote your products
• share what you are doing/finding

The Cons

• Can turn into a time waster
• loads of your first followers will be bots and snake oil salesmen
• You need something besides twitter to leverage your presence
• High noise ratio if you choose to follow a lot people
• your output has to be unique

The Conclusion

Don’t think too much about why you are using twitter. It’s simply a tool to connect with other people, think of it either like a mini blog or a public instant messenger. It serves no bigger purpose than sharing ideas and having conversations with other people. Sure you can promote products, information and whatever, but you have to offer value outside of twitter to benefit from it. It’s pretty useless to add hundreds of people in the hopes of marketing your product. You will have no influence through that at all.

The world does not need another twitter guide, so I am definitely writing one You can find the whole guide at “The Creatives Guide to Twitter”
Let’s cover the most simple question first…

what is Twitter?

To make a short story even shorter, Twitter is a so called social media platform where you can interact with other people. The interesting part about Twitter is that you can only use 140 characters for each message and are limited to a short output. It’s pretty much the sms of the internet, but so far without a fee for the messages you send. It’s a great free tool to give status updates or rather share what’s moving you at the moment.

How to use twitter

The first time I tried twitter I did not enjoy it at all. Check a website for updates regularly? Why should I do that? Oh boy, that was wrong! There are great tool’s such as twhirl, which is my twitter client of choice, or tweetdeck that transform twitter into an instant messenger. You get all your new messages and tweets right on your desktop and don’t have to check the website. It turns Twitter into a public instant messenger. Public as all your tweets are available to everyone as long as you keep a public profile.

Is 140 characters too short to be useful?

One could think so, and it probably is for some, but actually it helps to get down to the bone of the message and quit fuzzing around the hot cupcakes.
If you are still hesitating, give it a try, if you tried it without a client and disliked it, give it another go with a Twitter client, and if you still dislike it, just don’t use it

A few days ago I found a great set of 10 twitter stickers that really made my day. Sometimes it’s more important to share something on a blog than simply via twitter, so here comes to long overdue shout out about target from stick2target.com, go visit his bloooooog! I placed the link in the uber best of April, so it’s all about repetition !
The sticker I loved the most has to be the one fuckin with guys who chase followers like cupcakes, but you should know how I think about twitter followers.

…fuck twitter memes… that’s it. That’s the ultimate twitter meme. Enjoy twitter, stop thinking of it as some sort of tool that you can control. You can’t fake it. I really have to rant a bit about this whole “How do you succeed at twitter” party group. How do you succeed at twitter? You succeed in the real world or outside of twitter! That’s how you will get it working for you!
You should twitter for the sake of twitter, there is no right or wrong just useful, unique and memorable or boring and forgettable.
It does not matter how many people you follow, it does not matter how many people follow you. New twitter clients help you to add plenty of people and pretty much ignore them afterwards. The noise twitter creates is obvious, and adding people beyond good and evil is just bad. There are people out there with thousands of mutual friends, they are not even interacting with a quarter of those people on a regular basis. Twitter recently reduced the amount of people you can befriend, and that is a really good thing.

Time to get real

Why on earth would you need 12.000 mutual friends? Easy answer, there is no reason for it. You don’t need a group of 12.000 mutual friends, you will neither keep up with them nor know them all! Do you want to tell us that you read all those messages or actually care about them? Do you think those people care about you? OK you made us laugh there if you meant that seriously.
Let’s assume that you spend 1 minute on a conversation with all of your mutual friends, one minute is not a lot time, it’s pretty reasonable. That would be 12.000 minutes if you treat them all equal… 1 hour has 60 Minutes, 1 day has 1440 Minutes…. 12.000 minutes are roughly 8.5 days. And you seriously would spend 8.5 days to communicate with each of your friends for just ONE single minute? But they are all your friends… yeah right…it’s really time to get real.

The stalker effect

Twitter has some weird stalker effect, people love to follow people who they are interested in. That’s the reason why celebrities have thousands of followers! Do you see them following back everyone? NOPE! You will not benefit if you add more and more people, they will simply ignore you and your bullshit marketing efforts. Add who you like, who seriously interests you and start to interact with them. Start to actually be social and use this tool!
This whole collecting habit is all about marketing yourself Think of a pissing contest or some sick collectors anankastia(yes I did look that word up and there is probably some therapist to fix this addiction).
You will not have more friends if you befriend others. This behavior is like a miserable guy who walks around, meets people and starts to talk to them in a “I have no friends I need a friend” tone. Without knowing them, clinging, afraid to let people go, wanting to please everyone. It’s neither powerful nor useful. Do some character building exercises and come back when you have developed some self confidence. Or stick to this ego brushing twitter behavior. To make thing clear, those needy people might have many people following them, but they have very little influence compared to the real big players.

What to do?

As I mentioned in the first sentence, fuck twitter memes. Use it and have fun. If you really want to leverage yourself start to work on something outside of twitter and watch your followers grow. Twitter is great, but you should not force yourself into another rat race on who has the most followers or friends. It does not matter.