Top 10 X tips and tricks
Below is a listing of our top 10 favorite X (formerly Twitter) tips and tricks. These tips help make your X experience more enjoyable and helps increase your followers.
Customize
- Change your profile picture. Use a picture of yourself to make it seem more personalized if this is your X account.
- Utilize as much of the 160-character limit X BIO space allows. Include keywords your followers or potential followers may be trying to find.
- Create a background image. However, do not make the image too much like an ad or sales pitch. The background image must be less than 800 k, and we recommend a size of 1600 x 1200 for a large image or smaller if you plan on tiling the image or having it on the left side. Finally, realize that smaller resolutions and monitor sizes hide much of the background.
Third-party tools
Take advantage of the hundreds of different third-party online tools and services that enhance your X experience. Below are a few of our favorites.
- SocialOomph - Another great service with a collection of free X tools including the ability to schedule when tweets gets posted.
- X Fan Wiki Apps - Finally, this wiki has a listing of several hundred different X applications and tools for users wanting more.
Use X search
Take full advantage of the X search tool. Below are a few tips that help improve your search capabilities on X.
- Use the Explore X search engine. Search for people or topics that interest you, and discover new X feeds.
- Search for your website or blog URL (Uniform Resource Locator) and see if others are mentioning your page.
- Search for anything near you by adding near:"city state". For example, typing near:"Salt lake city Utah" club would return current tweets that have happened in Salt Lake City, Utah with the keyword club in them.
- Find people whom you may enjoy following by searching for keywords that interested you.
- If you do not want tweets with links add ? -filter:links at the end of your search query.
- Any time you get excellent results, click the "Save this search" button to save them. For those with the old X interface, these results are then found under "Saved Searches" on the right side of your profile. For those with the new interface, they are under the "Searches" tab next to your timeline.
Followers
X is not all about who can get the most followers. But there are many tips you can do to help get more followers and keep the followers you already have.
- Engage followers.
- Do not follow too many people. No one wants to follow someone following thousands of people with only 10 followers.
- Retweet interesting posts.
- Retweet and participate in conversations with people with lots of followers.
- Realize it is impossible for anyone to read every tweet.
- When first joining do not follow hundreds of people, doing this may mark you as a bot.
Create useful and interesting tweets
- Try to make all your tweets informative, useful, or funny.
- Do not post mundane posts (e.g., eating a bowl of cereal).
- Add hashtags to your tweets. For example, if your tweet is about computers, consider adding #computer in the tweet.
- Tweet frequently. No one is going to follow someone they do not know who has not tweeted in months. Try to tweet a few times a week or daily if you can manage.
- Do not whine or complain. Most people unfollow anyone who constantly whines or complains.
- Try to make your valuable tweets during the times people will most likely see them.
- Keep some space available in your tweet in case someone retweets your post.
- Use special characters in your tweets.
Know the lingo
Know the X lingo, these are a few examples: @reply, DM (Direct Message), follower, hashtag, RT (retweet), subtweet, trending topics, and tweet. See the X page for a complete listing of X (Twitter) terms and lingo and related terms.
Follow the masters
Following some masters of X and Social Networking gives you an understanding of how to tweet better, posts to RT, and inspire your tweets. Below are the top ten Twitters we recommend following.
@GuyKawasaki
@Scobleizer
@jeffbullas
@briansolis
@tonyrobbins
@timoreilly
@donttrythis
@zappos
@brainpicker
@savedyouaclick
Create and use lists
X lists are an excellent method of filtering filter through the people you follow. To create a list, click your X profile icon on the computer or the gear icon on your phone and click Lists. Once in Lists, click Create new list on a computer or the + icon on the phone. After creating a list, visit the X page you want to add on a PC, click the three dots for More user actions or the gear icon on the phone, and click Add or remove from lists.
Our Computers and Tech list is an example of a public list we created of interesting people discussing computers on X.
Go mobile
Apple iPhones, BlackBerry phones, Android phones, Windows phone 7 phones, and most of the other smartphones have X applications. Take full advantage of these applications. For users who do not have smartphones X also has extensive support for SMS (Short Message Service), which can send tweets over a text message.
Advertise
- Mention your page as many places as you can (e.g., your business card, e-mail signatures, web page, blog, and on Facebook).
- Create a tweet button or at least your name on your pages, similar to the examples below.