Sometimes you don’t need 140 characters to get something incredibly valuable out of Twitter. In April 2008, a graduate journalism student at Berkeley was photographing a demonstration in Egypt.
During the demonstration, he sent one word on his mobile phone to Twitter: “Arrested.”
His followers on Twitter saw the message and alerted both Berkeley and the US Embassy in Egypt. The next day a lawyer hired by the university got him out of jail. (His local interpreter wasn’t so lucky.)
Now I’m not saying that if you get arrested, a quick tweet from your mobile phone will have you back in front of the television before the commercials are finished.
But what is true is that close relationships that develop on Twitter have made it a place where people ask for help on all sorts of topics — and receive it.
That could be advice on where to find a good programmer. It could be a request for search engine optimization advice for your website.
It could even be tips for good products to promote on your pages. It could be about anything at all because just about everyone is on Twitter.
Turning Your Followers Into A Help Desk
The easiest way to find help is simply to ask the people you know if they can supply it. Obviously, this is always going to work best when you have a giant follower base.
The higher the number of people following your tweets, the greater the chances that one of them will be able to lend a hand. That means that as you’re building your followers, it’s worth paying attention to what each of them does and considering the sort of help they might be able to offer in the future.
Choose to follow a Web design expert, for example, and you should be picking up some interesting tweets that could help generate your own design ideas. But if you can get the designer to sign up as one of your followers, then when you ask a question about Web design, there’s a good chance that you’ll get a professional answer.
It’s also worth looking at the number of followers your followers have. If you can get followed by a few people with large audiences, there’s always a chance that your requests for help will be passed along or that their readers will click through to see your tweets.
Followers with lots of followers of their own can provide outlets to plenty of help.