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I’ve been on Twitter for a while now, and believe that I’ve seen enough to know how to become very successful and popular on there. Now, I know that there are a lot of Twitter “celebrities” out there that would have you think that they know how to use the service. To them, I say bollocks! I have been encouraged by no less than one person to share my wisdom with the world, and using FCC style statistics that means that at least 1 billion people want to know what I have to say. If the responses are positive, I might even consider expanding this into a full fledge eBook! Afterall, I think that’s currently the “thing” to do.

Your Bio

One of the most important things on your Twitter profile page is your bio. This is what everyone will look at to know who you are, what kind of person you are, where you are from, your favorite activities, your hopes, your fears, your childhood friendships, and your cat’s name. Since the bio is so important, many people spend as much as three months carefully crafting theirs. This is not something that you want to take lightly. Personally, I spent the better part of six months before I finally finished my bio. Since I like you guys so much, I’ll share with you what that bio is and how I got the inspiration for it. My bio is, “I needed a bio to get a better TwitterGrader score.” I’ll pause a moment to let you fully take in, and bask in its splendor. I know that you are wondering how I was able to come up with something so meaningful and profound, and here’s where I share with you my secret: I wanted to get a higher score on TwitterGrader. Amazing in its complexity, isn’t it? I encourage you to experiment with some different ideas for bios until you find the perfect one for your personality. Don’t be afraid to completely scrap an entire account and start over under a new identity if your bio fails miserably. Your friends and followers you’ve built up aren’t really that important. Which leads me to my next topic…

Friends and Followers

There is almost nothing as important as your friends and followers. Many people say that they really don’t care about how many followers they have, and this is usually completely true. You can tell that a lot of these people don’t care about their follower numbers because they have so many. Not only that, but many of them are also following thousands of people. Anyone that truly cared about their friends and followers numbers would never let this happen. You see, in order to be a truly successful Twitterer, you need to keep your friends and followers to as few as possible. This is very important. You ever wonder why Twitter pops up that Fail Whale so much? It’s because of the careless people out there stressing the system with all of their followers. Every time Britney Spears says that she’s using the bathroom, hundreds of thousands of people are notified. That takes a lot of work. A caring person would never let this happen. Which is why I can say after looking at Obama’s Twitter page that Barack Obama doesn’t care about Twitter people.

Now that I’ve told you that you need to keep your numbers low, you might be wondering how you’re supposed to do that. Since I’m such a nice guy, I’m going to let you know. Keeping your friends number low is pretty easy, as you just don’t follow anyone. You have total control over this, and so if your friends number ever gets above zero, you have no one to blame but yourself. As for followers, that takes a bit more work. If you’re following this guide, you’re going to become very popular, and as such a lot of people are going to want to follow you. Controlling this can be a bit tricky, but I have some suggestions which generally work well. This first is to be as offensive as possible. I find that it’s important to drop a racial slur or ethnic epitaph every couple of days. Since keeping racial slurs fresh is important, I recommend checking out the Racial Slur Database for some ideas.  I also find that mixing in some off-color jokes can be productive. I’m always on the lookout for new and insulting things I can put in my tweet stream. I encourage you to do the same. If all else fails, just talk about how much you love Rosie O’Donnell and that’ll work to weed out just about everyone.

Take This Seriously

Twitter users are busy people. They have lives and schedules, and can’t be bothered to waste a lot of time reading your tweets. They follow you in order to find out what you’re doing, and don’t need to you be frivolous about it. For that reason, you should never be funny. Your average Twitter user doesn’t have the time for your jokes. Just be as direct and too the point as possible. That 140 character limit is there for a reason. Don’t be afraid to have as many as 130 characters remaining in a tweet. When you’re telling your followers important aspects of your life, don’t try to embellish what you say. Your followers are all very interested in your life, and you don’t want to waste their time trying to be clever, just say, “I’m eating a cheese sandwich,” and be done with it. Straight and to the point, that’s what they want, not humor. These people have enough laughter in their lives already.

Hashtags

After spending some time on Twitter you will probably notice that people use hashtags in their tweets. This is when you have the # character followed by a word, acronym, etc. These can be very useful for tracking what’s going on, and for seeing who is talking about what. There are some important rules to follow when using hashtags. First, be as vague as possible. Try to use a hashtag that no one else will know what it means. This way you can feel superior and smug when people have to actually ask you what the hashtag is. Feel free to laugh at them and call them stupid for not knowing that #SCTJFAIHAO is Simon Cowell, the judge from American Idol, has an opinion. Another important note about hashtags is to use them as frequently as possible. Try to work in a hashtag into at least one out of every three tweets. When making all of those off-color remarks we talked about earlier, go ahead and tag them all (ie,#insultagainsttheentirepopulationofasmallpreindustrialcivilization). You should also know that it’s a good idea to make your hashtags as long as you can. If you’re using less than 53 characters (not counting the #) for your hashtag, you’re just not trying hard enough. Anyone can make an acronym that’s three letters long, stand out against the crowd with one that’s 103 letters. The last thing about hashtags is to claim ownership on them. When you come up with a hashtag, you can tell everyone that it’s yours. In fact, you don’t even have to come up with it. Even if there are five pages on Twitter search of people using it before you did, that doesn’t mean you still can’t say that you were the first to use it. 

Your Avatar

In addition to your bio, another important aspect of your profile is your avatar. This is the picture that you choose to represent you on your page. The default avatar is not very good, and you definitely need to change it right away. What you change it to is a matter of personal preference, but I’ll go ahead and tell you what’s right and what’s wrong. The thing that is important to remember here is boobies. Everyone likes them, and the smartest Twitter uses will use them as their avatar. Look at how many of the followers you get have an avatar of a girl in lingerie or a bikini. That many people can’t be wrong. What you don’t want to do is have some boring picture of you, like a headshot or something. 

Auto DMs

A DM is short for Direct Message. This is a private message you can send to a fellow Twitter user. It’s important to note that the user has to be following you in order for you to DM them.  A common practice amongst the very popular Twitter users is to use a service to do “auto DMs.” This is where when someone starts to follow you, they automatically get a direct message from you. This message is usually a thank you and includes at least one or two links to sites that they are promoting. These sites will be their blog, Facebook profile, their porn site, etc. People just love it when they receive one of these auto DMs. It makes them feel special because you took the time to write an automated message for your followers. As I understand it, these auto DMs can generate quite a bit of traffic to the sites that are linked in them.  You should try to find a good service that lets you set up auto DMs and try it out. If you can’t find something online that you think works well, then feel free to hire out the service to someone online that will work for 40 cents an hour.  

Retweeting

A retweet is where you repeat someone else’s tweet in your own tweet stream. When someone does this, it’ll usually start with an RT and then the other person’s name followed by what they said.  A lot of times you will say something that you want as many people to see as possible. When this happens you should make sure to say that you want everyone to retweet it. You should also DM a few (like 50) people, and tell them to retweet it to. You should definitely do this when it is for something you are promoting, especially if it’s something people don’t act like they care about. This is a great way to get the word out about something that you’re selling, or something else you’re doing that is for your own benefit. Going back to the auto DMs, it’s also a good idea to include in there that you want your followers to retweet everything you say. 

There you have it. A bit of wisdom for those of you wondering how to be more successful on Twitter. I hope that you were able to get something out of this post, and that you’ll find it informative. Feel free to share it amongst your friends. If I get enough positive feedback here, I might consider becoming one of those social media gurus and go tell everyone how to be successful on Twitter. I hear there’s big money in that.