I have a friend who likes to recount the following advice from one of his mentors:

“Be brief, be bright, be gone.”

As more marketers enter the Tweetosphere I think there are lessons to be gained from this advice.  Since you can’t help but be brief on Twitter we will put that part of the quote aside and focus on the other two.

Be Bright

At a recent conference, Guy Kawasaki made the simple point that instead of answering the question at the top of your Twitter page (“What are you doing?) he seeks to answer the question of “What is interesting?”  This is bright.  Be interesting to your Twitter followers.  There are many flavors of interesting including being thoughtful, provocative, informative, fun, or entertaining.   You don’t have to come up with all these interesting ideas yourself either.

• Retweet other content that is of interest
• Sign up for RSS feeds from your favorite pubs and comment on the pieces that are interesting
• Tweet about great email newsletter articles that you have received
• Search for multimedia content that would be interesting to your audience
• Insert your own bullet here because there are all kinds of ways that we can encounter the interesting and make it available to our followers

Be Gone

One of the unfortunate developments surrounding Twitter has been the proliferation of software products designed to make it possible to tweet in larger volumes, to pre-schedule tweets, to auto-tweet, to tweet from RSS feeds etc.  I’m not saying that the software is bad.  Just humans.  Apparently we cannot wean oursleves from the crack of thinking that if one tweet is good then 400 per day must be great.   Just give me one good piece of information each day or so and I’ll be happy.  I might even fall in love with your brand.  Give me 248 tweets a day and you have become a form of tworcher (Can we make that a word?).

The other day someone by the Twitter name of NewsSocialMedia provided an interesting link that I liked.  I followed them.  Since that time I have received about 1 tweet every 5 minutes from them.  None of them are interesting.  For the love of God NewsSocialMedia can you stop the Twarf (tweet barf) and perhaps just post when you actually have something worthwhile to offer.  Holy crap I just got two more from them as I was typing this.

Be interesting, be relevant and only post with as much frequency as will allow to sustain interest and relevance.