How to attract followers on Twitter and build a useful network

Twitter’s power only becomes apparent to new users once they get some followers and find worthwhile people to follow.

Unfortunately, many people don’t know how to attract followers or build a community on Twitter. Without a good community of people that you are following and that are following you back, Twitter offers little value. But Twitter is a fantastic tool for journalists, content creators and just about anyone really, and that’s why if you take a little time to first build your own little community on Twitter, you’ll find much better results in the long run.

Twitter is a phenomenal powerful reporting tool. We have a tutorial that will help you learn how to use Twitter as a reporting tool.

Thankfully, it’s not hard to build a community on Twitter that will offer you real value. Always keep in mind that Twitter is not about you. It’s about being social. It’s about the community.

Here is a little guide to getting people to follow you:

1. Make your account complete before anything else — Don’t have a profile photo? Don’t list a real name? Don’t have any profile information? Then you’re not ready to attract followers. Have a profile photo, use your real name, link to your personal site/blog/company, write a thoughtful profile and pick a background that works for you. This must be done first if you want to be taken seriously on Twitter.
2. Join the community – If you’re using Twitter for work (or to talk about your favorite hobby or personal branding purposes or whatever), there is a specific community that you want to connect with (or should want to connect with). If you’re a education reporter in Baltimore, you want to connect with educators, school administrators, parents and students in the Baltimore area. These are the first people you should target to follow and engage with.
3. Find followers — Wait, isn’t this post about attracting followers, not following other people? Following relevant people is a good way to attract followers. Sites like WeFollow (a Twitter user directory) can help you find followers to get started and doing a few Google searches will help yield quality people to follow as well. If a colleague recommended joining Twitter, go through their friends list and follow relevant people on it. Once you start following people (and you enjoy their tweets), start looking through those users’ friends lists to find additional people to follow. The #followfriday hashtag isn’t a bad place to look for people to follow either. If someone you really enjoy following recommends someone, then that person is probably worth following too. Also, search.twitter.com is a good place to search for topics and find people to follow based on those topics. Here is a tutorial on getting the most out of search.twitter.com.
4. Don’t follow people blindly — Finding value on Twitter is all about building a quality community. If you indiscriminately follow people, your Twitter stream may be all but worthless to you. Back to our example, if you want to find value in the Baltimore education community, you should primarily follow people in that community.
5. Offer value — Perhaps even before you join the community and start following people, you need to begin offering value. It doesn’t matter if you have zero followers, because if you start following people before you offer value, they won’t follow back. If you want to enter the Baltimore education community, start tweeting links relevant to that community, ask questions and offer some of your thoughts on education in the Baltimore area. That way when people come across your page, they’ll know what you’re about and will be much more inclined to follow you.
6. Start discussions – Once you’ve joined a community, started following relevant people and started offering value, it’s time to start conversations. Twitter is a social media site. You need to be social. One of the best ways to be social on Twitter is to start discussions. Ask questions and respond to @replies.
7. Be social — Starting discussions is part of being social, but it takes more than that. Monitor your Twitter stream and engage people when they say something interesting or link to something worthwhile. The @reply is your friend. Don’t be afraid to have back and forth exchanges on Twitter. It enriches everyone’s experience. And retweeting (RT) is fine as long as your retweeting something of value (especially to your followers). Better yet, add your own take to that RT. But be judicious with RTs, because too many RTs — especially those of dubious quality — will not please your followers.
8. Don’t just be about yourself — One of the biggest traps people fall into (especially those coming from traditional, one-way media) is that they make their Twitter account all about themselves. These people just link to their existing content (such as newspaper stories they’ve just written). Others just talk about themselves. People who are all about themselves rarely, if ever, interact with other people on Twitter and don’t understand that social media is all about being social. Unless you are Oprah or someone similar, you need to interact. Otherwise, you’ll never have a chance of building a worthwhile network on Twitter. Is you’re not prepared to give something to the community on Twitter, you will not find success on Twitter. It’s that simple.

If you find this post of value, you might find my Twitter account, @jiconoclast, of value too.

100 great blogs to inspire better beat blogging

PC Mag has a list of its 100 favorite blogs, and it’s a must check out for anyone who blogs and wants to become better.

Often the best way to improve at something is to study the best, and you can’t do much better then this list. Yes, many of these bloggers and blogs may not fit the beat blogging profile, but they are all outstanding blogs. Good blogging — let alone beat blogging — is quite a bit different than being a good newspaper reporter.

I would strongly recommend checking out non-news blogs as well. Inspiration doesn’t have to come from fellow journalists.

These blogs highlight a few fundamental truths of good blogging:

• Post variety — The best bloggers mix things up. Some posts are long, some are short, some are lists, some are polls and some are just photos with a little description. There are more options than just those, but you get the point. Newspaper writing can often be formulaic and designed to fill news holes. Blogging is nothing like that. If the best way to get your point across is to make a bulleted list than do that. Never try to make your content be something it isn’t.
• Interaction — The best bloggers interact, and interaction is a must for beat blogging. The biggest strength of the Internet is that it is two way. People can e-mail you, send you direct messages on Twitter, post comments on your blog, respond to your Seesmic videos and more. The best beat bloggers realize that their audience knows more than they do, and they harness that collective wisdom. 
• Be yourself — While blogging is different than writing for a newspaper, it doesn’t mean you should force yourself to be something you aren’t. I often see journalists new to blogging trying to be casual, write in first person, inject opinions and do other things they aren’t allowed to for a newspaper story. The problem is that it often feels forced. If you’re more comfortable writing in a third-person, objective style, than do it. You don’t have to be casual to be a good blogger. You don’t have to write in the first person from time to time to be a good blogger. You just have to be good at blogging and that means being yourself. I let the content dictate how I write. In time, most journalists will find their blogging voices, but my best advice is to drop all preconceived notions as to what blogging is and isn’t. 
• Visual aids — Good bloggers do more than just write. They also post other, more visual content. This could be photos, videos, charts, etc. Digital photo and video cameras are really cheap these days, and there is plenty of Creative Commons-licensed content available to use. Sites like Swivel make it incredibly easy to create gorgeous charts and graphs. And never, ever create a post about something visual (like a YouTube video) without at least linking to said content. This is the Web.
• User interface — Most of the most popular blogs are easy to navigate and are often visually appealing. A great design is entirely optional, but having a site that is easy to get around is a must. Less is often more. And a killer search engine is a must. If I know something is on your site and I can’t find it via your search engine than you’re doing something wrong. 

Hat tip to Will Sullivan for bringing this list to my attention on Delicious.

Wired Journalists starts a tutorial series

At Wired Journalists we’ve started a series of tutorials to help journalists get wired and learn new skills.

Many of these tutorials will be of interest to beat bloggers. The first tutorial is how to quickly, easily and cheaply start a podcast. Podcasting is a lot easier to do than many people think and can be a great way for a beat reporter to diversify content (and advertiser love them too).

Some of the top podcasts like Buzz Out Loud employ beat blogging to help report. If you think writing a few stories a day is tough, try producing a daily 40-minute podcast on tech. Buzz Out Loud relies heavily on its user community to help send in tips. They are great at two-way communication through a variety of mediums.

Eric Page, another Leadeboard winner, used podcasts and weekly chats to help diversify his beat reporting for the Quad-City Times. 

Please let us know of what kinds of tutorials you are interested in. Relevant tutorials, like podcasting, will show up at BeatBlogging.Org.