This is a guest post by Leo Widrich from BufferApp.

When I joined Twitter as a super late adopter, just under a year from now I had some strange views.

For some reason I thought that whatever I posted will be seen by everyone, every link will be clicked by all followers and at least half of them will Retweet my tweets, because they are so awesome.

Turns out, that’s not how it works. Gladly those naïve views above where I thought everything is about me and what I post have faded, more about that later.

Just a few days back I made some interesting observations as regards Twitter, Clicks and Retweets. Someone “big” with about 100,000 followers retweeted one of my posts and I was “whoa” this must get a LOTTA clicks now right? Turns out, he got 6.

This appeared very strange to me, knowing that my own tweets get between 10-15 clicks each, which isn’t much either, yet I have 1% of the amount of followers he had.

What’s going on here? Just an outlier and usually he does get 100′s of Clicks?

Or wait, aren’t we asking the wrong question here?

What means being successful on Twitter?

Someone once said to me

“Thinking that your follower count and number of Clicks defines your success on Twitter is so 2008”

And I couldn’t agree more. Of course at some point you will worry about the number of Clicks, as it means traffic for your site and eventually money in your pockets, but as the first and foremost reason to be on Twitter? No, I don’t think so.

What I learnt that really defines success on twitter is something else. To me it is answers to these questions:

• How many great conversations have you had today on Twitter?
• How many people have you helped today via Twitter?
• Whom have you met or reached that you couldn’t otherwise have reached?
• How many people have you brought together today?
• How much truly great content have you provided for your followers?

It is answers to these questions that makes Twitter awesome I believe and in short comes down being expressed with the much talked about term “engagement”.

And what’s really interesting about that is the fact that all the other effects of more followers, more clicks and more retweets will come by itself. You don’t have to be self-promotional all the time.

Mack Collier, one of my favourite blogger’s expressed it in this way:

Don’t share content to get on someone’s radar, share content because it’s amazing.

Lead interesting conversations, help others and everything will come by itself. And the best part? Focusing on others and helping them is much more fun than focusing on number of Clicks and Retweets.

Klout vs your Brain

This is why the hotly discussed topic of Klout or Peerindex is something very important I think. Without regards to how well their algorithm is, I feel that making an effort to create an output different to the sheer number of followers is extremely valuable.

It lets us drift away from the mantra that all we need is followers and helped me greatly to develop a new mindset which focuses on something else far more important: the people involved.

To drive this argument even further, simply observing and intuitively feeling how well you are doing on Twitter based on how much fun you have might still be the best thing to do. Let your brain and your original feelings tell you what you have to do more, it works better than I ever imagined.

How to be more successful on Twitter

Putting the above into practice here are a few techniques I am using to be successful and to get answers to the mentioned questions:

1.) Make your Tweets stand out

One of the things I have started to do heavily is to give my Tweets a unique face. Instead of tweeting the post title and link try finding a great quote from the passage and copy this one in your tweet alongside the link.

In this way you won’t be the 290^th Retweet of title and link, but it will be filtered news you provide for your followers.

2.)  Give the author credit

I am a huge advocate of doing this. Whenever there is a great post you are reading and you feel worth sharing, why not give some love back to the author? This shows your followers you have really engaged with that blog, giving them a sign of personal reference.

Especially combining 1 & 2 works really well I believe.

3.) Say more than “Thank You”

This is another way to boost the amount of daily new connections and relationships you can build. Whenever you get a Retweet or @Mention from someone, go that step further beyond the usual “Thank You” note.

Check out what they are doing. Take a look at their website and find something you can relate to and then most importantly: tell them that. It is a great way to learn more about the interesting things others are doing and on the side you are building a strong followership too.

So are your Twitter efforts in vain?

Over to you now: What are the steps you are taking to succeed on Twitter? Do your terms of “success” differ to mine? I would love to discuss it with you below.

Leo Widrich is the cofounder of BufferApp.com, a Twitter App that allows users to schedule tweets easier than other scheduling Apps you might know of. As he focuses on getting Buffer off the ground, Leo writes and gives Twitter Tips at blog.bufferapp.com. Leon loves to connect and build a relationship with new users. Don’t hesitate to say Hi.

In my opinion, the whole conversation about what is the right way to use Twitter or who’s using it wrong just adds to the confusion of those on the early stages of social media.

There are different styles and it seems that we tend to go one way or the other. What’s important is that the objective of using Twitter for your business is clear to you. Your voice, as some call it, will develop naturally.

What I want to do with this post is provide some basic understanding and clarity on the different styles to see if there is in fact, a right way to use Twitter. If you navigate through some of the accounts of the biggest names such as @guykawasaki, @chrisbrogan or even @aplusk you will be able to see the differences in style very clear.

So who’s using Twitter the right way? Who cares… what’s important here is that YOU as an entrepreneur or brand, reach your goals. So this is how it looks like from a basic point of view:

1. Conversation

Conversational users are the ones where you see a heavy use of @replies, not so much of self-promoting or even sharing content. This is the way to get to know and interact with actual human beings, Retweets are important but not real interactions.

Business opportunities are created this way, seriously.

On the other hand, users enjoying of some level of popularity sometimes are turned into a constant thanking for praises from their followers and there is no real value provided. The other thing that’s very common to see is users interacting with only a small group and ignoring the rest of his/her network.

2. Aggregation

The user gathering information to share on Twitter, hopefully valuable to those in the community. Mostly links from blogs in a specific niche.

If you share useful or interesting articles in your industry, you become resourceful. People will trust you with the information you share, specially if it’s not so obvious. Sharing is good karma, if your competitor published a great article, share it with your network and you’ll see what I mean.

Also to consider is that there is no real engagement in sharing, while you will get retweeted, there is no interaction with other users.

Don’t become a Mashable feed, believe me, you will annoy everybody. Besides, nobody needs a link to Mashable to find it (you get the point, right?).

3. Self Promotion

A biggy, up for some controversy for sure. Self-Promotion is how you share your own. There is nothing wrong with sharing your content, events or work with your network as long as that’s not all you do. Great content doesn’t promote itself (read my post “10 Steps For Self-Promotion“).

You really have to be careful with this because constant self-promotion will make you look as spammer in your community, besides, nobody likes a pushy salesman.

4. Personal

Photo Credit: Femto Photography

People sharing what they’re doing, which was the original purpose of Twitter, at least until they changed to “What’s Happening?” I guess. We used to say nobody cares if you’re having coffee but apparently now we do, as far as you tell us where you are having it.

It is important to humanize your content, people also want to know about the person and your points of view. Always having in mind that nobody cares about every single step you take during the day, unless you are Tiger Woods, of course.

Don’t turn your Twitter into a Foursquare broadcaster, perhaps you should only be on Foursquare…

So Which One?

How about none! The problem is not that, the problem is that we lean towards one. If we focus on being ourselves and not on what others think or the so-called social media experts advice us to do, we’ll do just fine. During the day (on the real world) you establish conversations with co-workers or potential clients, then you tell somebody about a great documentary or article you read, you probably tell a friend you’re having coffee at the corner and even tell somebody about your new product. You don’t walk around just sharing news all day…

Represent yourself as who you truly are, technology means nothing.

A Matter Of Time And Work

What nobody seems to mention is that this is also a matter of time and work, people that get retweeted a lot without even posting their own links have been actively working on their own business, building trust on their communities, providing value and sharing their knowledge.

Let me tell you a short story (and sorry to use myself as an example…). In my previous business, besides the traditional advertising methods (yes, in the “before Twitter” era) I developed a distributor program to enable independent people to represent and sell my product. It was very hard at the beginning to get in front of as many people as I could and then convince them, even my small office was playing against me, but it was built over time and a lot of hard work. There was a point in which all I had to do was show up for a few hours once a week to say hello to people and chat, share a few laughs.

I don’t think being fully conversational works for just anybody at just any time. In reality, the timeline would look something like this as your network grows and you build trust:

Over time, conversation slowly replaces everything else, sharing other sources will still be important, self-promotion will almost vanish to probably an occasional blog post of your own because your community will do that for you and personal sharing should slightly increase as they want to know more about the person.

Are there exceptions? of course, @guykawasaki is all aggregation, @mashable is pure self-promotion. That is what they do. Take in consideration that you should develop your Twitter style thinking of your objectives.

Now it’s your turn…

What’s your point of view? Do you think you fall into one of these categories? Is it possible to have a balanced Twitter style? Share with us in the comments section.

Yep… The conversation has left the building and you might not be aware of it.

Do you know exactly what happens to conversations on the social web? How far they go or where they die? Are you aware of the real impact created by your latest blogpost? Once the conversation leaves the blog, we lose visibility of it, but that doesn’t mean it died.

Let me give you an example, we’ll pretend that you wrote and published an article on you blog and posted a link on Twitter. If you want to see if you had any retweets, you go to your @mentions page on Twitter and you see the actual tweets. Now, here is the question, what happens when somebody tweets about your content and doesn’t give you that @mention? Look at the following graphics:

The first graphic shows a tweet that includes 2 elements that make it easy to track. First, the mention of the Twitter handle of the author which will automatically display on the @mentions page. Second, it is using the same URL and that will let you track it, in this case it is an Ow.ly URL.

This is a different case, and you might be thinking right now that the author didn’t get credit, but this is awesome, a person is sharing your content. The reason it doesn’t look like the one on top is probably because that person arrived from a different source, it is clearly not a Retweet. Here is the question, how do you even know this ever happened if you are not mentioned and it is using a different URL?

So What Do You Do?

You need to track reactions related to that specific post. Sounds easy? It is. These reactions are happening on different social networks, somebody makes a comment on your blog, another person Diggs your story or submits it to Reddit. Wherever the conversation goes, you need to follow it.

Why? Think about this for a second, if you are creating content to attract more prospects and there is an existing conversation somewhere out there about what you said… aren’t those your prospects? shouldn’t you be involved?

How To Follow The Conversation Around You

As usual, I will mention some specific tools you can use, in order to find out who is talking about you.

UberVU

UberVU gathers all the activity related to one specific URL, it doesn’t matter if it was tweet, a digg, a stumble or a comment on your blog. This way, you’re collecting data even if you were not mentioned or the person didn’t use your tiny url…

The other feature I love is the alerts. You can setup email notifications to stay up-to-date on every reaction that happens on the social web. UberVU also generates charts for easier analysis.

Disqus

Is the commenting system that you see in this blog. Disqus actually displays all reactions right at the bottom of the post and it doesn’t generate any analytics for you, but what’s important about this platform is that it literally takes the conversation out of the blog. I have to clear that up because the last time I said that, someone asked me “what’s the point of taking the conversation out of the blog?” and the answer is that it is really not up to you. What Disqus does is give you the possibility to keep up with it.

Bit.ly

As you probably already know, Bit.ly is a URL shortener, but there are a couple of things you might not know. It recently passed TinyURL as the most popular URL shortener and more importantly for you and me, it can be used on Facebook and it tracks the number of shares you get by your friends. If you look at the following graphic, you’ll notice that it is tracking the number of clicks on the URL you create and the ones created by others under the same service, but it is also tracking the number of conversations in different platforms like Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed or Backtype.

Take a quick look…

There are ways to take a quick look and have an idea of what’s going on, mostly with Twitter. If you use websites like Topsy or Tweetmeme, you can see who has been tweeting about you or your content. You’ll be surprised of how different the results are. In this story shown on the graphic for example, which is my latest post “10 Reasons Why I Use HootSuite… And You Should Too“, Tweetmeme says it got 18 retweets while Topsy says it was 24, but the count is useless if you don’t do something valuable with all this.

Wrapping Up

Do you still wonder why focus groups and surveys are dead? Companies are listening to this stuff because it is the real deal, people talking about one specific topic without any restrictions. See it this way, that is your prospect out there, she is talking to somebody else about your service and doesn’t know you’re listening…

A final thought to wrap it up, how about you connect with these people, there is nothing more targeted than this.

What do you think?

You hear it all the time, “social media is a 2-way channel”, “it’s all about others” or “it’s like a cocktail party…”

All good concepts, but what do you actually do once in front of the screen? Social media is about Karma, I have built a little list of things to do in seven days that can get you some positive vibrations…

Day 1: Don’t Think About What To Say, Just Listen

Most of the time we are focused on what to say. Hell, half the time in a face-to-face conversation, we’re just dying to see the other person finish talking so we can give our very valuable point of view. It is often said in Sales that you can close more deals by listening to your client, because the client is providing you with the necessary tools so you can cover his/her needs. Have you ever been in front of a sales rep that is running his mouth about something you don’t need?

If you listen carefully, you will know exactly what to say and when. It is no different in social media, would you interrupt in the middle of a conversation? Or would you listen first? Besides attention is one of the most beautiful gifts you can give.

Day 2: Visit 2 Blogs And Comment

We all follow at least a couple of blogs. Instead of just enjoying a good read and then surf away, make a comment, interact, provide your opinion. That is exactly the format to do so. If you provide a valuable point, at least one person in the thread will be interested in following you back to your site to see what else you have to say, not to mention the site’s owner.

A simple comment on a blog can be the beginning of a conversation or even a friend or follower.

Day 3: Talk To 2 Complete Strangers

Remember your mom telling you never to talk to strangers? Re-wire your brain. I’m not telling you to go talk to just anybody, in real life you wouldn’t engage in a conversation about Formula 1 if you didn’t know anything about it… Find somebody that shares the same topic, that is involved in the same line of business, stay in your arena.

Exchange ideas. Provide value. Don’t think the other person will reject you, that’s what social media is all about.

Day 4: Share Somebody Else’s Content

There are people in your industry providing very useful content in different kinds of media, stuff that can also be useful to your network. Share it with them. There are a few benefits behind this practice starting with the possibility of establishing a new relationship, getting in front of the other person’s network, your network will see you as somebody that’s providing useful resources and of course you are increasing the chances of the favor been returned.

There are different ways of sharing others content, you can Retweet an article, post a link on your Facebook Wall, submit the story to Digg and many other ways. One thing to consider, always make sure you are crediting the right people and you are sharing the original story.

Day 5: Introduce 2 People That You Think Can Benefit From Each Other

This is also a practice that will get you a positive return. Be creative, there are other possibilities besides providing someone with a referral for a sale. You can introduce two people in the same industry, maybe two people that can complement each other or are simply talking about the same topics.

You will be remembered if the relationship takes off.

Day 6: Answer 2 Questions From People You Don’t Know

Questions on any kind of topics are being asked everywhere every day. When you answer a question you are positioning yourself as an expert on the matter and it is a great way of becoming part of the conversation.

How to find these questions? Let me help you with that. Search for existing conversations on whatever topics you wish, you can do this on Twitter or Yahoo! Answers, both good places to find questions. Do it with the intention of providing a service, don’t use it as a promotional vehicle to pitch your services. Provide links to resources.

Day 7: Think About What’s Needed, Not What You Need

You need to contribute to the conversation and want to do it with something of value, if you have been listening, you’ll know how to do that. When you are writing a post on your blog or simply engaging in a conversation in one of the social networks, think of others first, think about how to cover a need.

Make sure you are not using social media just to promote yourself. Do you like that guy that’s always talking about himself and never makes a pause to listen to others? Me neither…

In Other Words…

This thing is more about others than yourself and it sounds a lot like leadership to me. Apply some common sense, this really works as in real life, if you start caring about others they might just start caring about you too…

The other factor that can’t be ignored is the touch of brutal honesty. Represent yourself as yourself.

“People should be impressed by who you are, not because you’re trying to impress them.”