Written by Phyllis Zimbler Miller, Twitter Marketing Expert

Writing about the top best practices for Twitter is fraught with danger because, if you ask three people, you’ll probably get three different lists.  Thus with trepidation I will attempt to provide you with what I believe are the most important best practices for Twitter:

#1 Best Practice:

Share valuable information of yours and others with links to this information.  This can be blog posts, news articles, website pages, news photos, whatever is appropriate.

#2 Best Practice:

Retweet worthwhile information tweeted by others with links to this information.  This is a great best practice as long as this is not the only thing you do on Twitter.  (Some people do only retweet other people’s information without ever engaging in conversations.)

#3 Best Practice:

Engage in conversations – use tweetbeep.com or other applications to know when people are tweeting about topics of interest to you and then participate in the conversation.  This includes answering questions when you can do so.  (For example, where’s a good fish restaurant in West Los Angeles?  Or where can I find odd-size men’s shoes online?)

#4 Best Practice:

Do NOT make your tweets all about you.  If you are sharing valuable free information, that’s one thing.  But if you are promoting your own products and services all the time you will get a reputation that you do not want.  (You will also get an undesirable reputation if you constantly tweet trivial information such as when you are going to sleep.)

Good Sense is the Motto for Twitter Best Practices

The important element in any best practices list is using good sense.  Put yourself in the other person’s shoes and consider what you like to see in tweets and what you don’t like to see.

Here’s a slightly edited email I received:

“I quit Twitter. To be frank, I hated it. Too many strangers wanting to be my friend. Much too much small talk. I just don’t have that kind of time … I simply can’t muster up the interest required in knowing that Rob just returned from his kitchen with a bologna sandwich.”

See what I mean?  Judge your tweets by what you’d like to receive.

FYI — I have a personal system by which I avoid reading tweets about what people had for dinner, etc.  And the Twitter third-party application tweetdeck.com enables you to separate out who you are following and thus only read the stream of tweets from people sharing valuable information.

Just make sure you are one of those people sharing valuable information!