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This is a guest blog post written by Leo Widrich, co-founder of
Buffer, a Twitter publishing application. He writes
Twitter Tips every week on his blog.
“The platforms of social media are built around weak ties.” - said Malcolm Gladwell in his famous article in The New Yorker. He explained that our connections on Twitter and the like are nothing more than acquaintances.
I went along with his words for a while, yet my doubts were growing week after week. The conversations and connections I am having on Twitter go way beyond what “weak ties” mean to me.
Sure, sending one tweet back and forth will not create a deep relationship. Yes, following someone doesn’t make you friends with them. Yet to me, this is only one part of the story on Twitter.
The reasons for me to be on Twitter aren’t to send one tweet back and forth or to follow someone and to leave it at that. Like in real life it takes time and effort to build something meaningful.
5 Techniques to Build Strong Twitter Connections
1. The Art of Retweets
“Retweet someone once and they will notice you, retweet someone often and they will remember you” ~ @AskAaronLee
I think this is a great quote explaining that it is up to you whether the connection will be weak or strong. Putting Retweets in the spotlight of your conversations can have a great impact on which form of relationship you are building.
Making retweets sincere and personal alongside a certain frequency helps me a great deal to kick off great conversations. In order to do this I like to edit RTs instead of lazily hitting the RT button. If you can, add a short comment and show a sign of appreciation for the person tweeting.
Doing this in an honest way, because you enjoyed the content can put you in touch with great people, going way beyond quick acquaintances.
2. Know People Beyond Twitter
What also makes a big difference when getting in touch with new people on Twitter is to know them beyond Twitter activities.
If you are thoughtfully building up your followership with people that interest you this will be common sense. Yet it took me quite a while to be fully attentive of my followers and the people I follow.
Check out their bio, hop over to their blog and take a glance at what these people are doing. It often leads to a lot of great connection points you would have not considered before.
Making you aware of what interests this particular person in more detail, makes you more aware about their tweeting and allows you to carry out more meaningful conversations.
Put the focus on noticing others and naturally they will notice you.
3. Helping Others – Let others help you
At any given day when I glance through my stream there is always a certain number of people asking for help.
Of course, it will be hard to help at every occasion, yet every so often I simply take the time to give my full attention to a few questions being asked.
In my case it was a lot of guestposting opportunities I took up, simply because some people were too busy to write posts one week and asking on Twitter.
Just like in real life helping out others puts your connection to a different level. If someone can count on you when they are in need, without big introductions, you can safely see this as a great start to a meaningful conversation.
4. Build Outside Connection Points on Twitter
Had a great Skype call? Watched a great video by someone? Read an awesome blogpost? Why not use this as an opportunity to start a meaningful chat through it.
I personally think Twitter is exactly built for this and creates an amazing opportunity to instantly get in touch with the person you want to give feedback and show appreciation for.
Of course, doing just that will not make you best friends, yet this can be seen as a kick-off point. Continuing to combine it with points #1 and #2 have proven for me to create long lasting exchanges of thoughts on Twitter.
There are so many opportunities each day where we can connect with others, simply taking up more of them is often easier than we think.
5. Let it Come Naturally – Enjoy Yourself
I want to end this list with the most important part in all of this for me. Forcing yourself to do it, because you have to “create engagement” and want to “grow your network” it can be tricky.
Instead, make it the first and foremost reason to enjoy yourself to do all this. Let it come naturally and follow the conversation, retweets, tweets of engagement with your intuition.
This allowed me to really focus on my area of interest, sticking to what I like – talking to people interested in the same field.
Doing makes it easy to push yourself a lot further, after all, doing what we like is a lot easier to do.
You Already Know All This
I believe that most of the mentioned points are very obvious if someone explains them for traditional human relations in real life for you. If you only give your friends a call once a year to tell them to show up at your party or conference this might be tricky.
My sincerest believe is that all the natural concepts we know about human relations are also applicable when talking about Twitter. As many of us move to an online world more and more each day – Why would it make sense that we can’t create meaningful relationships through that?
I admit doing so consciously did take a while for me though, yet the value you can get out of this has increased immensely once you actively commit to it. The moment you start to care is the moment you start to get the same things back is what I learned.
What Do You Think?
Is it possible after all to create meaningful relationships on Twitter? Or, is Gladwell right in his saying that those connections will remain weak ties that you cannot build out further?
Image credit: runkalicious
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