Here’s how to create whuffie (aka social capital) in just 140 characters.
Excerpted from The Whuffie Factor: Using the Power of Social Networks to Build Your Business by Tara Hunt (Crown Business).• Share personal reflections about your company, product, service, and brand. When you offer your personal thoughts, you open yourself up to real conversations with customers and create trust.
• Discuss events—both your own and other events your audience may find interesting. By talking about your own events as well as others, you provide a service to your followers that finds events that will interest them and if they interest you as well, this provides a way to meet your followers.
• Contests (“The first three people who answer this trivia question get . . .”) drive more followers and interest in what you tweet.
• One of the conventions of having a conversation in public is to reply to someone’s comment by using @twittername at the beginning of a message. For instance, Tony at Zappos could say to me, “@missrogue I found that episode of Mad Men to be the best.” This indicates that Tony is actually following what I say and makes me feel important.
• Another Twitter convention is to use direct replies that are sent privately. You do this by using “d twittername” at the beginning of a message. This is helpful to answer people when the response is a private matter or when you want to show concern (i.e., someone reports an accident, etc.).
• Announcements—if it is interesting, tweet it.
• OHs, which stands for overheards. If someone says something funny that could be entertaining if repeated, type “OH: ‘Repeat the funny message here.’” For instance, one of my favorite overheards was, “OH: ‘Teamwork is coated in BBQ winsauce.’”
• Help spread fun Internet memes or jokes. Quite often, people will post links to funny videos and photos for people to follow. Just because you are tweeting from a corporate account doesn’t mean you lack a sense of humor. These tweets are entertaining and show your fun side. Feel free to be playful. It’s a playful medium.
• Lyrics and quotes—famous quotes are entertaining for your followers. Picking good quotes from industry leaders that align with your company philosophy is a double bonus.
• Links to media you create—video is fun, podcasts, perhaps interviews that are posted online about you, and so on.
• Shout-outs—@twittername rocks! Thanks for the great link: http://insertlink.com. These make people feel great, too.
• Tweets that make people laugh are awesome, but tweets that make people think are even better.