Tips for engaging on Twitter

• Monitor Twitter to find out who's talking about you, your employer, your colleagues and your competitors using TwitterSearch. You may want to search for other keywords relevant to your area of expertise.
• Be personable yet professional; don't say anything you don't want everyone to hear. Keep in mind that your tweets will be indexed by search engines forever more.
• Share links to interesting content. Twitter can be a substantive source of useful information if, along with messages about what you're doing, you also include links to interesting articles, blog posts and other content you find online.
• "Follow" people whose tweets you find interesting. Generally, follow back people who follow you unless you find their tweets dull or "spammy".
• Don't feel you have to keep up with reading every message in your Twitter feed. Use TwitterSearch and #hashtags to hone in on interesting discussions. People include hashtags in their tweets to form a trackable discussion thread. Use TwitterSearch to check out the popular #journchat hashtag, which is used by PR pros and journalists discussing the changing media landscape. Simply search for "#journchat".
• Avoid syndication tools that push content to Twitter in robotic-looking ways. Remember, Twitter is about personal connections. If you want to tweet about your own projects, make sure to tweet about other things too that won't be considered self-promotional.