Lessons in Twitter Hygiene

Now that Twitter has reached the "Peak of Inflated Expectations" in its hype cycle, I thought I'd share my Twitter best practices with you.
If Facebook is to find old friends, Twitter is perfect to discover new ones. But be careful: "friends" in a very, very broad sense. If your expectations are really inflated, Twitter will drive you crazy. Here are a few tips to keep your sanity.

1. Getting started. Create a profile on Twitter.com Add a profile picture, a website link (preferably your blog) and a short bio. Don't "lock" your Twitter profile. If you want to Tweet about stuff your wife or boss is not supposed to hear: don't Twitter.
2. Find the Twitter interface you're most comfortable with. Many use Twitter.com (the web interface) but the TweetDeck app is very popular, too. I use both the web interface and TwitterBerry. To keep the messages under 140 characters you will need to shorten your urls. TinyURL is popular, but bit.ly allows you to monitor the stats of your shortened url, too.
3. Find people you know on Twitter by checking who in your Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail or MSN contact list is already in. Follow all of these people and take at least a week or so to simply listen to what they are talking about, who's talking to who, etc. Ignore Twitter's Suggested Users because that list is simply bollocks.
4. Learn the language. This first phase is also very useful to learn about Twitter Lingo, like DM, RT, HT, FTW, #followfriday, "Pics or it didn't happen", or "That's what she said!".
5. Follow the lead. Have a look at Twitter users they talk about and follow those if they appear interesting. Also, follow @MrTweet. Trust me on this one: Mr Tweet is a great service that helps you find out who you should follow because they are "relevant to your current needs".
6. Go local. Find out who's the Twitter Elite at your home town (example: Mechelen) and/or in Belgium, have a look at their Twitter pages, and follow them if they appear to be interesting. You might end up having a Twunch (twitter lunch) with them some day.
7. Kill the robots: unfollow any Twitter users that are simply an automated RSS-to-Twitter feed. If you want to know whether e.g. a news site has updated, you don't use Twitter: you use RSS.
8. After a period of listening, start adding value: reply to whom you follow by answering their questions, by re-tweeting interesting tweets they do, post tweets that you think might make them react in the same way (i.e. reply, retweet, etc). The reply feature is the one that interests me most because of its speed: Twitter is near-realtime and an example of Instant Media. If you can't stand the heat: lock your Twitter profile and step away. Twitter is not for you.
9. Check your replies regularly and follow whoever replied something useful to you. Do a Twitter search of your nickname one in a while to find out who's re-tweeting or quoting you and follow these too if they're adding value. Bonus tip from @FrederiekPascal: use ReTweetist to track how tweets and URLs are re-tweeted.
10. Take time to find your voice. It's not easy to add value in just under 140 characters. You can always delete a Tweet you regret, but unfortunatly Twitter Search never forgets.
11. After at least one month it's time to kill the Twitter Zombies. Twitter Zombies are users that haven't said anything at all in over one month (or three months, depending on how patient you are). Find them by using MyCleenr or Twitter Karma and unfollow them. Careful: MyCleenr stops working as soon as you follow over 700 people.
12. Unfollow the Twitter Snobs. Twitter Snobs are people who have large flock of followers, but almost never follow back. They do this because they don't wish to enter the conversation, or because they are obsessed with their Twitter Karma. One of the parameters to get a high Twitter Grade, for example, is to have a high followers-to-following ratio. An other parameter is to have even bigger Twitter Snobs go against their own principles and follow you back. If Twitter founder Evan Williams is following you (@ev: 224,100 followers, but follows only 948 of them back), your karma is reaching for the sky.
13. Recognize Twitter Spammers for what they are. They usually have bios/websites that mention "finding Twitter gold" or "free e-book on how to get 10k followers in one week". One of their characteristics is that they talk to you first, to have you follow them back. As soon as you do, they send you an automated DM you with a link to their "get rich quick" scheme site. Unfollow them as quick as you can and tell everyone you did so, too.
14. Try to be nice until you follow almost 700 people (or less, depending on how nice your really are). You will want to use MyCleenr in the future and that's where I got the 700 number. If you're not particularly nice, you will get annoyed at the point where you follow, say, 350 or 400 people. It's up to you to decide some of the users are too nuclear for you, but generally I simply look at who doesn't follow me back and probably never will. FriendOrFollow is a great tool to do this. Try not to obsess with FriendOrFollow or take it personally when someone has decided not to follow you back or to unfollow you. Twitter is about people and conversations and things like that are bound to happen.
15. Repeat steps 5 to 14 until the end of times.

Anything missing? Let me know (@bnox).