Rolling for Initiative is a weekly column by Scott Thorne, PhD, owner of Castle Perilous Games & Books in Carbondale, Illinois and instructor in marketing at Southeast Missouri State University.  This week, Thorne talks about Twitter and using it more effectively.

Though in our industry Facebook currently gets most of the attention, as it should, given that roughly 80 percent of the population has a Facebook account, Twitter is proving highly useful for distributing marketing content and messages to the 10 to 15 % of the US population with a Twitter account.  Unlike Facebook, Twitter is designed for distributing news rather than statuses, making it the perfect medium, at least currently, for distributing content.  Copy a link in which your followers might have an interest, describe the links and hit "Tweet," sending it out immediately to all your followers, whom, you hope, will retweet it.  How to do so effectively is the question though?
 
In his recent book, The Science of Marketing, Dan Zarrella discusses analyses he conducted of over 5 million Twitter accounts and what he found.  The first thing he found was that accounts with lots of followers tended not to engage in conversation with their followers, i.e. if a follower tweeted a question or comment to them, they generally did not respond, which seems counter intuitive in such a social media as Twitter.  We generally think of social media as ways of engaging and communicating with other.  However, it appears that the more successful you become on Twitter, the less time you spend talking with your followers and the more time you spend tweeting them links to content that, because they follow you, they will find interesting, the more likely you will gain followers as a result, as they retweet your content.
 
For example, you run a game store or publish games.  By default, you start off with a tiny Twitter following.  However, those who do choose to follow you do so because they have an interest in the store or the games that you publish and want to find out more (Twitter has, by default, become a source of breaking news par excellence).  Ergo, they want to hear what you have to say and, if they find it interesting and worthwhile, they will retweet to others, expanding your reach and building your followers.  To do you, you have to both entertain and enlighten them.
 
Additionally, keep Tweets positive or at least neutral.  People go on social media to enjoy themselves and generally feel good.  Again, except in the case of breaking news, extended negatively will cause you to lose followers.  John Kovalic and Matt Forbeck, both prolific tweeters, keep things light, funny and/or informative, which has gained both of them thousands of followers.
 
Which lead to, is it possible to tweet too much?  Zarella's research would indicate "No."  He found that accounts with lots of followers tended to tweet a lot as well, averaging about twenty two tweets per day, approximately three an hour assuming a typical eight hour day.  Of course, more active tweeters tend to keep the phone close at hand, ready to pass along an interesting or amusing insight to their followers any hour of the day (or night).
 
In short, to better use Twitter, find things your followers would find interesting, pass them along (fairly often) and keep it positive.  Zarrella has much more to say about using Twitter, which I am certain he is tweeting about right now.

The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.