Written by Phyllis Zimbler Miller, Twitter Marketing Expert

Figuring out what to tweet about on Twitter is part of an overall strategy question connected to your overall Internet marketing plan.

For example, if you are trying to increase the traffic to your blog about books, you may decide to focus on tweeting links to news items related to book publishing and book marketing along with the links to your own blog posts.  In this way you are establishing yourself as an expert in the book field by both the links you share and the original content you write.

Now let’s take this example a little further.  You may decide to sell an ebook on publishing off your website on which your blog also resides.  You may begin to add into your tweet mix occasional announcements about this ebook.

There’s a range of opinions as to how many of your tweets should be what’s called “self-serving”– promoting your own products or services – and how many should be informational or conversational or whatever.

I personally do not count tweets with links to my blog posts as “self-serving” as long as the information in the blog posts is valuable.  Others may disagree with this opinion.

Let’s say, though, that you are new to the world of social media networking and you do not yet have a blog or a website or a business of any kind that you want to promote.

What to Tweet about in This Case?

Do you have any hobbies or interests? Perhaps you are a green environment advocate.  Then you could tweet information that you want to share about going green, such as links to books, news articles, and blog posts.  You can add your opinions about the articles you are linking to in order to personalize your tweets.

You are establishing a brand for yourself even though you may never use that brand in connection with business.  Still, you have a starting point from which to morph into a new brand if that’s what you decide to do.

If you have many interests, I would suggest limiting your tweets to two or three main topics.  For example, my tweets usually focus on Internet marketing information or U.S. military information.  If I started tweeting about numerous topics, my brand identity would be so diluted that people would have a hard time figuring out what I am about.

This is precisely why I choose which news topics to write on in connection with the news site huliq.com.  Although I have several other interests, I turn down stories that are not on what I call the “spine” of my story – the backbone of how I am presenting myself online.

Even before you get on Twitter you should decide what to tweet about.  Will you be emphasizing your political views (an arena in which you want to be careful that your tweets do not come back to bite you) or your gardening interests?

Once you have made this decision, you can use Twitter’s own search capabilities or a third-party application such as tweetbeep.com to alert you when there are tweets connected to the topics on which you tweet.  Then you can jump into the conversation and reply to people who are tweeting about these topics.

Or you can retweet the tweets of others that you find valuable.  Again, these retweets should probably be connected to the spine of your story.

As you participate more and more on Twitter, you will begin to follow people whose tweets you find especially valuable.  You can study their tweets in order to decide which tweets you think are most effective in attracting followers.  Then you can emulate the patterns you uncover.

Sometimes your tweets are actually private, and should then be sent as a DM – direct message – to a person following you on Twitter.  If the person is not following you and you want to send him/her a DM, you can tweet a reply to this person and ask to be followed so that you can DM him/her.

Warning: Whatever you do, do NOT tweet in anger or use swear words or viciously attack someone.  This is not proper etiquette and can quickly lose many of the followers you worked so hard to get – if not getting you kicked off Twitter.

FYI: I edit and revise my 140-character tweets as carefully as I do anything else that I write.  I want to make effective use of the Twitter character limit while sharing information that I hope will be valuable to others.