I thought I'd talk today about Twitter.

I'm a fairly new Twitter user, you can find me there as @philiptolhurst so I don't have a huge following, maybe 900 people, but I am investing in time to increase it.

Even in the short time I have been a member I have learnt a few things that I thought I'd share with you.

The first thing I found out is that people who you follow often send you an auto-mated message in response. This is called a direct message or a DM.

My original DM read as follows:

"Wow thanks for following. Check out my blog and look for my book, George and the Dragon, in early March."

Not to bad I wasn't forcing any links on anyone but still fairly generic as DMs go.   A short while after introducing this I read some advice regarding DMs.   I cannot, unfortunately remember where I read the advice or I'd link to it.  What they basically said was if you must use a DM use it to open up a conversation with people.  They even suggested using "Knock! Knock!"

So instead of the above I changed it to:

 'Who's your favourite dragon?" 



Almost straight away I noticed the difference.  Not everyone responds and some people don't even have a favourite dragon.  Which is sad, at least in my opinion everyone should have a favourite dragon.  However, you do get responses and you do get to open up conversations with people.

I did get one smart answer:  Duncan Bannatyne.

So not long after this I changed the question to:

In all of Film, TV and Books who's your favourite dragon? (No not from the den!)

This isn't really about the question though it's all about connecting with people, making an impression.  Making them want to follow you and realise you're not just trying to sell them something but are actually a real person.

The answers, if you are interested, I have received were not surprising except that Puff was the most popular.

I never even considered Puff when thinking about what people would answer;  Smaug (from the Hobit), Seraphina (from the book of the same name),    Saphira (from Eragon),  Falcor (from the Never ending story) or even my favourite Draco (from Dragonheart).  But no not Puff.

So I'll leave you with this;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qu_rItLPTXc&feature=kp