10 Twitter Etiquette Rules

Long since anointed by the media (over the past year) as the NBT (next big thing), Twitter has a bunch of local customs that people new to it need to learn.

I've started compiling some etiquette and best practices for using Twitter, which limits users to 140 characters. Most ideas come from other sources, to which I will give due credit. Most of these tips are most appropriate for people new to Twitter. (Apologies is any or most of the tips seem familiar to people who have used Twitter for a long time (i.e., several months).

1. Remember, Twitter is a conversation. When responding to other tweets, try to give context by mentioning the subject or question you're responding to; that makes it easier for your followers, saving them from having to go back to the beginning of the thread to figure things out.
   
2. Ask questions; don't just pontificate.
   
3. What part of 140 chars do you not understand? (Thanks to jyarmis).
4. Discretion: Some things are better left unsaid. So avoid stream-of-consciousness-blogging via Twitter. Check out this article about what happened when a tweet backfired.
   
5. Transparency is vital -- just as with any other social media.
6. Consider quality vs. quantity. (I am going to look at what makes for a useful tweet in the next few weeks.)
   
7. Many users provide links to interesting articles, information, etc. Guy Kawasaki does this many times a day.
8. Use proper grammar. Check out Mignon Fogerty, the host of the Grammar Girl blog/podcast who tackles proper grammar usage on the popular micro-blogging site. Her tips are available at"Grammar Girl's Strunk & Twite: An Unofficial Twitter Style Guide," and include:
   
1. "Don't start posts with 'I am.' You're answering the question, 'What are you doing?' It's OK to answer with fragments in a conversation."
2. "Use proper capitalization. Typing in lowercase doesn't save characters; it's just lazy." I totally support this tip.
3. "Don't use abbreviations such as 4U and L8...Shorthand symbols such as >, =, &, and @ are allowed."
1. For an interesting look at the impact of Twitter, IM , SMS and texting may have on language, check out the Boston Globe's "Is language dead or evolving? Some see the use of shorthand and abbreviated text as the beginning of the end. But studies say students know the difference between formal writing and instant messaging."
4. "Use numerals, not words, for all numbers."
5. "If you can't say it in 140 characters, reevaluate whether you should be posting it at Twitter."
6. "Provide links and context whenever possible. Remember that many of your followers can't see what you are responding to."
9. If people follow you, it's polite to "follow" them back. However, because of that, be careful about adding too many people at one time -- that's the Twitter version of spamming. People will think you're trying to sell/hype something rather than start a conversation.
10. It's really about conversation. When I tweeted about writing a blog on etiquette, I got a lot of response. But be careful contacting someone you don't know -- like in real life, you could be seen as butting into someone else's conversation. If they don't know you, they may not respond. (A better way to initiate a conversation would be to comment on that person's blog. That assumes, of course, that the person has a blog.)
1. In fact, according to jljohansen in a tweet written after my first draft of this article, he said, "First rule of Twitter is 'Don't be creepy' after that, Right and Wrong are dependent on social contract of your friends/follows.
2. To which Nedra said, "Sadly, the creepy people don't realize they're being creepy."
3. See, how the conversation idea works?
   

Check out some other articles: Twitter + Etiquette = Twitterquette?, Twitter Fan Wiki, and "The 10 rules of Twitter (and how I break every one)" by Robert Scoble.

Of course, there may be a rule that I've just broken, according to a comment on Scoble's blog, Scobleizer: Don’t blog about how you use Twitter.

Here are a couple of other good how-to Twitter articles: "Twitter for Beginners"; Ten ways market your blog on Twitter without being a spammer; and "The Art and Science of Retweeting for Twitteraholics."

More advice on Wikipedia

Here's some more advice on Wikipedia:

6. Sometimes dis-contributors (see earlier posting) will delete entries from Wikipedia newbies just because they have no track record. The best way to overcome this objection is to build a track record. And the best way to build a track record is to edit pre-existing entries. The secret to that is simple: There are truly lots of misspellings and grammatical errors throughout Wikipedia -- so it is not difficult to contribute to an entry without having to have factual expertise on a topic. Just click onto "Edit This Page," and, just like MS Word, Wikipedia software uses a red underline to identify misspelled words. Once you correct them, the page goes into "Your Contributions" page. Of the more than two dozen entries, just six are new material. The rest were copy-editing changes. Which, believe me, Wikipedia desperately needs.

7. The secret to working successfully with Wikipedia and other social networks is frustratingly simple: you need to make the investment of time. Time to check out the site and learn the ground rules. Time to contribute ...by following those ground rules. And time to make sure your contributions remain, and don't get edited out by dis-contributors. Clients who want a quick turn-around and quick results are going to be disappointed because it takes time to be seen as a useful member of these online communities. If you rush into things, you'll make mistakes, and could inadvertently harm your client or cause.

8. Many contributors to Wikipedia seem to be lazy. By leaving the Wikipedia world, and doing a little searching on the Internet, I've been able to find credible sources for correct misinformation. Again, if the dis-contributors did a little digging and more copy-editing, they could actually make a real contribution to the Wikipedia world.

9. Lee Gomes, a Wall St. Journal reporter and "Portals" columnist, makes an interesting point in his recent column, "Forget the Articles, Best Wikipedia Read Is Its Discussions." Discussion pages are "where Wikipedians discuss and debate what an article should or shouldn't be." Gomes discusses issues raised on the Ireland entry (should the entry be called "The Republic of Ireland"?) or the page for kittens (an "editor was objecting to the statement that most people think kittens are cute"). While I understand discussions about subjective perspectives, some discussions about facts get heated, but could be readily solved by further research. For example, there was a debate on the discussion page for Joan Didion surrounding the term "prose stylist." The term was deleted from her entry by someone who felt that all writers could be classified as "prose stylists." (That is not the case with many Wikipedia entries, in my opinion.) Others stated that "prose stylist" is a valid description of Didion. This debate started April 2005 and continued through Aug. 2007. Part of the problem was getting a citation to back up the description of Didion as a prose stylist. I did a quick Google search, and found a reliable citation from the New York Times. Problem solved. That's an example of Wikipedians being too lazy to find information outside the Wikipedia world.

10. There's a lot of movie and entertainment information on Wikipedia, and I found that many of the articles include citations from Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com). So that in some cases, the Wikipedia entry doesn't offer as much trivia or interesting dialog lines as IMDB. While IMDB does have user-generated content, it could do a whole lot more by letting its users know to add content there, and for making it easier to post content onto the IMDB site. I've added information to IMDB before, but it took several days before the information appeared -- which is a benefit of Wikipedia: you can see your information instantly.