Top 10 Twitter Tips for the Design Crowd

The design industry is embracing social media a little more every day. The AIA published an article for architects using Twitter, Engineering News Record wrote about firms’ goals for Twitter and each day you can find more design professionals sending out tweets. Like all social media tools Twitter has its advantages and disadvantages, but until you dive in you wont know what potential it holds for your company. Personally, I’ve been on Twitter for a couple years, but didn’t use it much at first. Now I’m addicted. I’m following great people and finding new information everyday. Recently I’ve added my firm to Twitter. It’s just getting started, but I’m already seeing the potential, especially as our clients start joining and tweeting. If you’re thinking of putting your firm on Twitter I’ve got some tips for you to help ease your transition. Here are my top 10:

1. Dive in personally, then transfer what you’ve learned to help your company succeed on Twitter.
   
2. Concentrate on quality of followers, not quantity of followers
3. Share valuable content, remember it’s not all about you
4. The RT (that’s twitter speak for retweet) is the equivalent of telling someone “hey, I like what you’ve got to say.”
5. Follow people. You don’t want to be that company that’s only interested in having people listen to them. Not sure who to follow? Find a few people you respect on Twitter and check out who they’re following.
6. Expect organic growth, rarely are there overnight successes on Twitter or any platform for that matter.
7. Participate. Twitter, like any social media platform, is only as good as the effort you’re willing to invest in it.
8. Let people know you’ve joined twitter - add a link in your email signature, blog about it, talk it up in your newsletters.
9. Follow people in your industry and learn from them.
10. And because Twitter can turn into a huge time suck if you let it, get organized. Use an application like TweetDeck to categorize the people you follow by topic, get notice of your mentions and direct messages, shorten your URLs and handle multiple Twitter accounts, all within the same window.