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Jan 09, 2010 -

But I did manage to catch most of his talk about how to kick butt on Twitter. And I was tweeting here and there. Soon, several of you following me on Twitter asked me to summarize some of his key points.

So here goes – 10 points that I picked out from the dozens Guy Kawasaki made in his talk:

1. The Tweetmeme button is the most powerful button the Internet today, if you run a blog or content site. It instantly shows that others have found value in an article or post. People see the number of tweets and think, "It must be good." Second, the button makes it easy for people to retweet your article.


2. Make your tweets retweetable, by providing interesting stuff. "Retweeting is the sincerest form of flattery," says Guy. "A person who retweets is saying I think what you said is interesting enough that I am risking my reputation to send it to other people.”


3. To find interesting stuff to tweet, subscribe to Smart Brief updates; Stumbleupon categories; and Alltop categories.


4. Get people to help you. Use ghost tweeters (i.e., ghost writers) to do outbound tweeting. Never use a ghost to respond to Direct Messages or “@ questions” people send you. Guy says there’s an 80% probability that he will respond to an “@ message” or a DM, except at 3 am PST.


5. Ignore the dogmatists who say Twitter is only about telling people about "me" – he calls it “meforming.” Guy says, “If you are Lance Armstrong tweeting ‘I have a flat tire,’ that’s interesting. You or me tweeting about a flat tire -- not interesting. Do not do much ‘meforming.’"


6. Tweet everything on your blog. If you don't think something is tweet-worthy, then why are you writing about it on your blog in the first place?


7. Repeat your tweets. According to Guy, “We repeat each tweet 4 times. Each time we tweet, something gets an average of 600 click-throughs regardless of how many times we tweet it. If we had stopped at one tweet, we would have limited the potential of that tweet to 600 visits, instead of 600 x 4 visits” to the site where the link leads. (Remember, many many site owners are getting the benefit of the visits from these multiple tweets, not necessarily Guy’s sites.) He went on to point out that mainstream media, such as CNN, repeats their news every hour because they know that people are not listening every minute of the day.


8. Be prepared for negative feedback -- you WILL get someone saying something negative if you tweet.. No matter what you say, some people will disagree with you. If at any given moment, if you're not upsetting someone on Twitter, you're not using Twitter. Don't let the .001% dictate using Twitter as a marketing tool. Mother Teresa would get negative feedback on Twitter. Use Twitter the way YOU want to use it.


9. Do not buy followers -- most of those offers are scams. You should earn your tweets by tweeting out interesting stuff.


10. Should you tweet a sponsored message for money? Guy says, “It depends. If Reynolds Tobacco asked me to tweet that cigarettes don't cause cancer -- absolutely not. But if the manufacturer of a car I love, like Audi, asked me to, I don’t think I would turn it down. And I would disclose it as a sponsored tweet.”

For Guy’s slides please go here