Twitter Etiquette: Five Dos and Don'ts

CIO - In our beginner's guide about how to get started on Twitter, we examined the basics of the social networking service that allows you to share short messages (140 characters or less) with friends, family and colleagues. But like any social network, the Twitter community has its own set of unwritten guidelines - or etiquette - that dictates good (or bad) behavior on the service. Some people call it Twittequette.

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We call our tips guidelines, instead of rules, because Twitter was designed to be a very open forum. Some people might feel differently about what constitutes good Twitter behavior, depending on what they hope to get out of the service or their networking philosophies in general.

But based on interviews we did with social media and career experts who have seen people try to balance their personal and business lives on Twitter, we worked up five dos and don'ts for the average Twitter user, from deciding whose Twitter messages (known as "tweets") to follow or what content to share without jeopardizing what matters most in your professional and personal lives.

1. How to Follow and Un-Follow People

Even social networking experts share different philosophies on how to deal with "followers" - the people on Twitter who subscribe to your tweets. Some people believe that if someone follows you, it's impolite not to follow that person back. (Under Twitter's default settings, you'll generally be notified by e-mail when someone decides to follow you, and you'll be provided with a link to the person's Twitter profile, where you can choose to follow the person back and receive his or her tweets.)

But especially if you're just starting off on Twitter, you shouldn't feel obligated to follow all people back, even if you worry they'll think it's rude of you, our experts say. Instead, you should follow people who share your interests or whose tweets you find meaningful or compelling.

"You should only follow people who you trust, you think are interesting, or that you learn from," says Jeremiah Owyang (@jowyang), a senior Forrester analyst who researches social technologies and keeps a blog on Web strategy.

It's possible you'll offend some people, but ultimately it's harder to maximize the value of Twitter early on if you're Twitter homepage is flooded with tweets unrelated to your field or tweets that don't make any sense to you, Owyang says.

At the same time, don't be afraid to take some risks and follow someone outside your immediate circle, says Stowe Boyd ( @stoweboyd), a social media consultant who writes the /message blog.