Ten Quick and Dirty Twitter Tips

1.  Only follow people who are of interest to you.  Do not follow back just because they follow you first.  Remember: they could be simply gathering lots of followers just to look good and may not actually add value to you.  Don't waste your time as unfollowing people can be a painstaking process.

2.  Do not follow someone simply because they have lots of followers.  Check their tweet count; if they're inactive or not very active, what's the point following them?

3.  Do not follow someone if they are not following/followed by many people, yet they have many tweets, this could mean that the account is simply automated and that they're not actually on Twitter often.  You cannot automate following people and that's one clear way of telling.

4.  Use justunfollow.com weekly to unfollow people who are not following you back or are inactive.  The more useful people you have following you the better.  Conversely, the more useful people that are following you, the better.

5.  Do not follow someone because they followed you and they have millions of followers but few tweets.  This is a waste of time as chances are they won't have much to offer you by way of shared information or sharing your information.

6.  Once you are past 1000 followers, you should start using your lists.  Here is a post 'Authors: When is it Time to Shift Gears on Twitter?' outlining how to do that.

7.  Even if you're following someone who isn't following you back, if they are offering valuable/sharable tweets, you should still follow them.  Don't think of Twitter as a popularity contest.  Twitter, if used properly, can be a valuable source of information.

8.  If someone spams you or replies to a tweet with irrelevant information, simply to offer a plug for their product/service, unfollow and/or block them immediately.  This is bad form and clearly shows that they aren't going to be helpful to you as they're unfamiliar with proper Twitter etiquette.

9.  One way to be more beneficial to your Twitter audience and therefore earn yourself more followers and retweets is to use a service such as Buffer or Hootsuite (I use both).  Both offer paid and unpaid services where you can spread out/schedule tweets (your own and other people's tweets) so you can work more efficiently.

10.  Never pay for followers.  Ever.  Ever. Ever.  Bad form.  Also, you'll end up receiving followers irrelevant to your niche, thus useless to you.  I've never tried it personally, but this is the main complaint I hear from those who have tried it.

Bonus!  Finally, if you're new to Twitter and need some help getting started, here's an ebook called 'How to Get Followers on Twitter' that can give you some pointers.  It's a compilation of all my early posts regarding Twitter (under a pen name), including how to use Buffer and Hootsuite, how to get massive retweets and so much more.