Independent Thinking Blog

DC PR Pros Talk Twitter Best Practices

Thanks to the terrific board members at WWPR (Lauren Lawson, Debbie Friez, and Joan Coyle) for putting together a great panel yesterday on Twitter best practices. It was a lot of fun, and I was delighted to share the dais with some really smart women.

Here are a few takeaways:

Debbie Friez

  • Stressed that it is really important to give credit where credit is due. In other words, retweet or otherwise attribute information to its source.
  • Suggested that you can use TwitterSnooze to temporarily block one person’s chatter. So if you know a colleague will be tweeting all day from a conference but don’t want to hear it, TwitterSnooze can help.

Kaitlyn Wilkins

  • Advised people to identify the type of community they want to join.
  • Talked about the value exchange: understanding what you can do for your followers versus what content you will be putting out and what you are asking of them.

Shonali Burke

  • Said the way to understand Twitter is to use it–just get out, experiment, and engage.
  • Reminded people that Twitter is a tool, and not even the only one in the social media toolbox.

Nicole Nolte

  • Talked about building your community by looking for people with common interests (professional, personal, volunteer) and then starting conversations.
  • Noted that organized Twitter chats can be a great way to engage people and start to build relationships.

As for me? The top two things I hope people take away from my remarks are (1) to build your network organically; and (2) that it’s not about numbers. Oh, and here’s that on-point Ben Stiller-Ryan Seacrest video on the latter topic.

Were you at the WWPR event yesterday? What was your #1 takeaway?

Update: Debbie Friez has posted some additional takeaways from the panel on the BurrellesLuce blog.

You May Also Like