When using Twitter, keep your usual good manners; but expect them of others as well. Following that idea, using Twitter is an efficient tool in promoting your webpage, articles and photographs. Twitter is also the place where name dropping is not a solecism but an accepted must.

The more I use Twitter, the more I like it. I find it much easier to keep in touch than any of the so called social websites and much more fun as well. I have compiled a few tips for those who want to use it more efficiently for the promotion of their articles. Real Twitterdom (or being a Twitter Star) is not achieved by the number of your followers, but by their quality. As an added plus, Twitter traffic explodes (see http://www.comscore.com/blog/2009/04/twitter_traffic_explodes.html).

When you start your Twitter account, the first following you should put in is Xomba (http://twitter.com/xomba), obviously. You can't get your Xombytes advertised by Tweet directly through the Xomba service yet, but I am sure it's a matter of days until Xomba has caught up with that. The second thing is building up a following. Again your start is with Xomba, to be concise the Xomba Twitter profile, where you open the Followers page and choose about 50 profiles you think interesting to follow. Repeat that process with the followers of other interesting profiles once a month and watch the number of your followers grow.

From here, normal good manners take over to build up your followers. If somebody follows you, good manners dictate that you follow them, and this works both ways. To get rid of the bad mannered ones, I do a thorough house cleaning once a month. Every person I follow that does not follow me in return is ditched. There are spammers as well following you to make you follow them and then ditch you after a few days, which make the house cleaning a necessity. Always do the house cleaning immediately after you added the months 50 new profiles or you might ditch and follow the same person within the day.

There is a second set of spammers using magpie and adtweet, two advertising companies sending out useless ads to the followers of their members. Those twitterers get a single warning by retweet: Don’t magpie (or adtweet) us, or we will ditch you. If another magpie tweet comes through to you, ditch the person immediately as not being a quality follower but a spammer.

You will also find a lot of celebrities having Twitter accounts, and not all of them are fakes. There are two of which I know as a fact that they are genuine: Author Stephen Fry (http://twitter.com/stephenfry) and the wife of Britain’s Prime Minister, Sarah Brown (http://twitter.com/SarahBrown10). Both are following me, but I haven’t checked yet Britney Spears and MCHammer, who are also following me. If you want to know if a celebrity who is following you is genuine, just have a look at Stephen Fry’s following list, if he follows, they are genuine; if he doesn’t follow it it’s probably a fake account. Stephen Fry forms part of a celebrity network that vets the celebrity accounts on Twitter for authenticity.

I hope you enjoyed that bout in names dropping. But I wonder why the Foreign Office is following me? As you notice, Twitter is not for the paranoid mind.

Someone started a game on Twitter quite some time back called #followfriday. Obviously it happens on Fridays and people taking part tweet their friends with a person’s profile (or several) to start following on that Friday. I started it as well, taking one of my friends’ profiles and recommending him or her.

You might wonder about the hash in front of followfriday. The hash gives a theme that can be found through Twitter search (the search is found in the menu bar at the bottom of the Twitter page). You may use any kind of theme like #xomba or #books to categorize one of your tweets. It usually pays off to tweet an xombyte several times with some time in between, stating it’s content, e.g.: I might tweet this article as ‘read about twitter #spam’, or ‘for #xomba users’.

When using Twitter, don’t forget to check your DM (direct messages) and your @retweets which are answers to tweets you sent out. The DMs you receive when following people are usually automated through one of the many Twitter tools and I just delete about 90 percent of all messages without bothering to answer. But there are others, so keep up with it.

And here’s a short description for twoobs (twitter newbies) if you are really just starting to use Twitter: http://www.webupon.com/Social-Bookmarking/How-to-Use-Twitter.222033.

And finally, you might want to follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/britameric. Please do, I’ll follow you as well.