How to Set Yourself Apart on Twitter

For many new Twitter users, the whole platform can seem like a sea of tweets where your information gets lost in the abyss of the 22 million users that are active each day.

So how do you set yourself apart from everyone else? It’s not easy, but here are a few suggestions that can help you raise your Twitter voice. Remember, ANYONE can make it on Twitter with the right amount of recognition.

Participate in Trends

Trending topics are listed in the right-hand panel of your Twitter homepage. They are the popular words involved in current events, celebrity gossip, and world news. You can view the trends by location. This is smart, especially if you are just starting out. A great way to get noticed is to search for trends in your area. That will not only increase the relevance of your tweets, but also will appeal more to others who may be reading your profile.

When you participate in a trend, you can either write the word, or put a hash-tag (#) in front of it to make it a link to the trending topic. You will be added to the trends feed for the particular topic that you are talking about.

One thing to be aware of: if you only participate in trends, you might get lost in the Twitter abyss that scared you so much in the first place. Make sure to vary your tweets, participating in trends every so often.

Be unique

You will not stand out to the Twitter community if you just parrot the popular tweets that you read in the trend feeds. Create unique and insightful tweets that will benefit the niche whose attention you are striving to get. You want to make sure that you are unique, but not too bizarre (unless that is what you are going for).

Keep in mind a decency and taste level. Everything you post on the internet can and will be traced back to you–there is no avoiding this. For example, you do not want to be tweeting about how horrible tobacco is for you if you work for a tobacco company, or tweet about how much you hate your supervisor when chances are someone in your company checks your Twitter account. Word travels quickly.

Be engaging

While you do want to appeal to a niche, you still want to appear attractive to mainstream society. It is fantastic to tweet about anything and everything you are passionate about. However, tweet about it in a way that people won’t de-follow you. For example, say you love dogs and you and your best friend have 100 inside jokes about dogs. Don’t just tweet your inside jokes–be appealing to a larger audience.

Appear human

This seems like a no-brainer, right? After all, you are a human being. So act like it!

With so many RSS feeds and products out there, it’s hard to differentiate between real human Twitter accounts and automated company Twitter accounts. If you are doing a personal Twitter account, take the time and put your personality into it. If you are doing a business Twitter account, add your personality, but always use a professional filter. Take the time and interact with the community by re-tweeting and striking up conversations with people. Remember, quality is greater than quantity, but interacting with people will make your profile available to many more users.

NEVER combine your personal and business Twitters. It is confusing to people because you are trying to appeal to completely different niches with only one Twitter account.

In addition, so many people these days will copy and paste the same message to different people of importance all within minutes of each other. This appears to be spam and unnecessary. If you are going to tweet @ a bunch of different people, make each tweet special and tailored to that person. Also, don’t tweet @ 100 people in a row. It looks unprofessional. Space them out. (Tools such as HootSuite are fantastic for this because you can create pending tweets to tweet later.)

Most importantly, be yourself!

Represent your personal or professional brand the way you would like others to perceive you, and you will find your niche on Twitter.