Jerry Work recently published an interesting article on the Talent Zoo website titled “Three Incontrovertible Tenets of Twitter.” Jerry recognizes that social media can be overwhelming (who has the time?), and offers some really sounds advice to help make it more manageable to maintain:
- “Concentrate on your neighborhood” – Be focused. Follow people in a specific industry. Send tweets that are specific (and helpful) to people in that industry. Healthcare is where I focus.
- “Add value” – This is great advice for everything you do in social media. Whatever platforms you choose to engage (facebook, a blog, Twitter) be sure that you are contributing something that advances the conversation and is of value to the reader. One of my goals in my social web work is to provide resources for other healthcare marketing professionals and to serve as an aggregator of interesting information.
- “Be systematic” = This is perhaps the most difficult tenet to follow. Jerry recommends sending out several tweets each day. Frankly, I’m lucky if I do one or two tweet a day. But Jerry is right. One tool you can use is tweetlater.com. You can write several tweets and schedule them to go out throughout the day. I do the same thing with blog posts. I will write four posts on a Saturday and schedule them to go out throughout the week. This maintains the perception of activity while you are off attending to the crisis of the moment. We are all too busy and need to sue these shortcuts or automation tools to make social media more manageable.
Check out Jerry’s article on the Talent Zoo website by going to http://www.talentzoo.com/news.php?articleID=2429. You’ll find some very simple, clear thinking about how to use Twitter effectively.
Post by Dan Dunlop, The Healthcare Marketer
