My current limited use of Twitter has been to merely notifying people of my latest blog post.  Starting in March this will all change.  In March I shall become more sociable – twitterwise!

After all, Twitter is a Social Media tool.  Another channel by which I can connect with people and share ideas and relevant information.

I’m setting myself some goals – for I’ll need a clear reason to make this work.  Firstly, there will be monthly goals.  These will be translated to a weekly action plan, and then daily tasks.

In terms of logistics my plan will start with me allocating 30 minutes a day to twitter.  Each day I will allocate:

• Early morning: 10 minutes
• Midday: 5 minutes, and
• End of the day: 15 minutes

Overall, the 30 minutes will be used, approximately, for 10 minutes of:

• retweets of relevant tweets
• tweets of new information
• responding to tweets

With the objective of having some 10% quality tweets per day.

In accepted of best twitter practice, I’ll NOT be marketing myself, but providing value …

But I will be:

• giving more than I expect to receive
• sharing expertise and tips
• leaving at least 15 characters free in each tweet – room for those retweets!

The plan is initially to find some 20 influential people per week to follow.  By influential I mean twitters that tweet about information that I genuinely want to follow.  This will translate to me focusing on 1-2 people per day.

Now, this is not a popularity contest.  So I don’t have to read every tweet, I don’t have to reply to every tweet, and I’ll stop following people that don’t add value.  This is business – I’m branding myself.  I’ll be using my business twitter account – I’d be keeping my personal account (if I had one!), and my personal tweets, quite separate.  One objective is to build a solid interactive community.

For starters: before I follow anybody, I always check their twitter profile.  So, I must review my own profile – my “One Line Bio”!  Similarly, I must add “Follow-me on Twitter” to my email signature, and include a retweet link in any document I send out … I already include twitter links on my web site, on my blog, …

How do I find these experts, these influential twitters, to follow?  For starters I’ll use hashtags, and keyword searches – but this has global reach.  So, as a small business, I also need to focus on people in the same area as me – London, UK.  For this I’ll be using the advance twitter search, and nearby tweets.  These influential twitters should provide me with links to great resources, articles, and blog posts.  For the blog posts, I’ll leave a comment, and retweet.  Obviously, as this develops, I should expect to be following more than one “topic” – and, for this I’ll use twitter lists.

Some of the twitter tools I’ll be exploring along the way are:

• Twitter advance search: http://search.twitter.com/advanced
• Nearby Tweets: http://nearbytweets.com
• Hashtags: http://hashtags.org/
• tweetbeep: http://tweetbeep.com/
• twilert: http://www.twilert.com/ – back in February …
• Alterian SM2: http://www.alterian-social-media.com/
• backtweets: http://backtweets.com/
• twitalyzer: http://twitalyzer.com/
• tweetdeck: http://tweetdeck.com/
• refollow: http://www.refollow.com
• twelloe: http://twellow.com
• SocialToo: http://socialtoo.com/
• Twitter Karma: http://dossy.org/twitter/karma/
• And, of course, good old reliable Google, with: “twitter for …“

But my blog posts can’t stop.  So, I must to continue to:

• submit good and original blog posts that are concise, timely, and relevant
• join challenging conversations, and
• talk with passion about what I’m doing …

I hope you have time to follow me, and give me advise …