Twitter and the Micro-Messaging Revolution: Communication, Connections, and Immediacy—140 Characters at a Time

38 : Twitter and the Micro-Messaging Revolution

Make Micro-

Messaging a

Major Success

We’ve gathered advice from dozens of people who

use micro-messaging in their professional lives. In this

section, we’ll share their best tips and tricks.

Best Practices for Micro-

Messaging in Business

Because micro-messaging with external stakeholders

is a more common and public project than internal

micro-messaging, we’ve got quite a few recommenda-

tions in this realm. In case it doesn’t go without saying,

our first tip is that Twitter—with a vastly larger potential

audience than any similar system—is almost certainly

the place to set up shop with a public-facing account.

These suggestions all assume Twitter as the platform:

■ Lurk before you leap. Before you set up an account,

spend some time learning how people use Twitter.

“Twitter is not the right place for every organization,”

says Comcast’s Frank Eliason. “Hang out for a while,

maybe with a personal account. What’s the language?

What’s your audience like?” Follow a few friends and

people in your industry to get a sense of how they

use it (Twellow, http://www.twellow.com, can help

you find people by sector).

■ If you like it, emulate it. Before you start posting,

suggests Nathan Torkington, figure out what you like

about other people’s posts and think about how you

can produce messages like that.

■ Track what the Twitterverse says about you. ...