Unfollow inactive Twitter accountsAccording to a survey by RJMetrics, core Twitter users are very committed users, but interestingly, more than 80% of Twitter accounts are inactive.

So the chances are that you have quite a few inactive Twitter accounts in your Twitter following.

My view: they ain’t doing you any good. Might as well get rid of them!

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Many people I know get their own personal Twitter channel because their employer has set one up for their company. It’s a great way in to start getting familiar with what it’s all about.

When we help clients become effective in social media we develop editorial plans for them – a plan of which content you need to publish to reach your business, marketing, PR or communications objectives.

But what if you want to start up a Twitter channel for yourself? What do you tweet about then?! Well, unless you are trying to set up your own business, you don’t need an editorial plan.

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I recently came across a post on Hubspot called ‘9 Worst Ways to Use Twitter for Business’. The #1 Worst Way in this Hubspot blog post is ‘Be Overly Self-Promotional’. That’s a great insight. Most businesses are just so used to promoting their stuff that it’s not easy to switch their head-set to a more ‘social’ approach.

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Ever wonder what it takes to start a movement? This insightful and entertaining TED Talk from Derek Silvers explains how to start a movement in under 3 minutes. WATCH IT!

What a great explaination of the ‘building-a-movement process’! I think it’s useful to just repeat and sketch out what Derek said here:

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So, you are now on Twitter and you are welcoming your first followers. You must be thrilled with all the self promoting DM’s (Direct Messages) you receive every day. Sure, there are a lot of gold diggers on Twitter.

What you are after is building a qualitative network of followers. People that actually value what you have to contribute to the online conversation, and vice versa.

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Currently more than 300.000 people a day, register an account on Twitter. Registering an account is easy. Basically Twitter only needs your full name, user name, and email address.

So before you know it “John Doe (john_doe_67) is now following your tweets on Twitter” rolls into people’s mailbox. I often get these kind of followers. Sigh.

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My own little bi-monthly experiment…

Last year July my business partner Steve published a document on Scribd called “Business leaders and social media: a 4 step strategy framework”. It’s a useful little document for business leaders who need to direct their teams in setting social media strategy.

As a matter of habit and experiment, I retweet a link to the document to my Twitter followers every other month or so. Five minutes later I can see that the number of reads on the document has jumped up. Over the course of 15 minutes the documents gets an additional 40 reads. Now bad considering I only have about 800 followers.

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