So you set up your Twitter profile you’ve followed a few dozen (or hundred) people, and they’ve followed you back. You’re tweeting your blog posts, chatting with other people with @replies and you’re starting to get the hang of this Twitter thing. If that’s you, read this post. I’ll be explaining how journalists can increase their influence on Twitter.

(If you’re brand-new to Twitter, be sure to check out my tips on how journalists can use Twitter, how to get started, what to say on Twitter and how Twitter can help boost your blog traffic.)

Once you get into Twitter and the initial burst of your enthusiasm fades, Twitter can get stale. Don’t let it. To make Twitter effective for journalism, you need to keep adding followers. But more importantly, you need to keep building your influence on Twitter. The goal isn’t really to have the most followers, although more followers are helpful. Your real goal is to say stuff on Twitter that people find so valuable that they retweet it. (That’s just Twitter parlance for when someone repeats what you tweeting, crediting you.) That’s how your influence can grow because it’s not just you tweeting about your blog post or interesting observation, it’s other people doing it, too. That increases your reach exponentially.

So how do you improve your influence on Twitter?

• Find out your influence: There are two places I find useful to do this. Retweet Rank lists the 10 people who get retweeted the most of all the millions of folks on Twitter. You can also put your Twitter name in to assess your retweet rank and find out who has recently retweeted you. (I explain more about Retweet Rank here.) I discovered another similar site, Retweetist, from Guy Kawasaki’s post about how to get retweeted. Retweetist also ranks the top folks getting retweeting, but it shows how many retweets they had. You can put your own name in and find out how many retweets you had on individual days.
• Build on what you find: If you find out nobody is retweeting you, don’t fret. It may mean you don’t have enough followers yet (or enough followers who are fluent in Twitter). So add more followers. The simplest way to add followers is to follow people because many will follow you back. You want followers interested in your topic, so bloggers who blog on the same topic you do; journalists who cover the same beat in different communities; readers of your blog and other blogs like yours; folks in your geographic community(Digg founder Kevin Rose offers 10 tips for boosting your followers, including fill out your bio (many people, myself included, won’t follow people if their bio is empty or sketchy); follow top Twitter users; promote that you’re on Twitter everywhere you can.) You also can learn great best practices from other journalists on Twitter. Be sure to follow everyone at your newspaper, but also journalists in other communities.  Here’s a list of journalists on Twitter; it’s not comprehensive, but it will give you a start.
• Tweet regularly: I’m not saying you can never leave your computer. But to become an influence on Twitter, you need to engage. You engage by tweeting. Every day. Twitter is a conversation, so you can’t go days or weeks and say nothing and expect people to be thronging to hear your pearls of wisdom. My tweets tend to drop off on weekends and vacations, and I think that’s fine. But you can’t just swoop in, tweet a trial and then abandon Twitter until the next trial months later and expect to gain influence. That just comes across as if you’re using folks, not conversing with them.
• Start retweeting: As they say, to make friends, be a friend. To get retweeted, retweet. If someone you follow tweets an insightful link or observation, retweet it. Be generous. Karma will reward you. But don’t retweet junk. As Kawasaki explains: “The reason that retweeting is so flattering is that every time people do it, they are putting their reputation on the line. If their followers don’t like the retweet, their reputation is reduced.” Retweet value. He offers some great tips on types of tweets that are likely to get retweeted, such as breaking news (that’s right up our alley as journalists); the bizarre; tweets about Twitter; how-tos.  TwiTip offers some more tips on getting retweeting, including keep your tweets short.  Include a link in tweets and retweets, so it saves time for your readers. (Here’s where you can turn your big honkin’ link into a nice tiny one to fit into Twitter’s 140-character limit.) Certainly, help out your co-workers and retweet their tweets, but don’t stop there. To truly have influence on Twitter, you must retweet other newspapers’ stories and blogs that aren’t affiliated with news organizations; you must really join the conversation. Retweeting shouldn’t be just “me, me, me” or “my newspaper’s Web site, my newspaper’s Web site, my newspaper’s Web site.”
• Use retweet etiquette: While there’s no real Twitter stylebook (yet), some routines of use have developed. Dan Zarella offers a good list of the etiquette of retweeting, including repeating the name of the original tweeter to give credit where credit is due. For example, if I tweeted something under my Twitter name bloggingmom67, and you (joesmoe) wanted to retweet it, you would use this format: RT: @bloggingmom67 and then include the tweet. If a third person wanted to retweet, they’d type: RT: @bloggingmom67 via @joesmoe. The reason for following this routine is it makes you appear as if you know what you’re doing and you’re part of the Twitter community. And it helps get your name and the names of people you retweet out there, increasing influence. I also recommend thanking people who retweet you because it’s a way of forming another connection. (To find out who is retweeting you, just run your Twitter name through search.twitter.com every once in a while. I do it at least daily.)

Follow me on Twitter.

– Gina

I love Twitter, and I find it uniquely suited to help journalists create a community, reach their readers and find out what’s buzzing. Here are some tools I use regularly to help me use Twitter to the best advantage.

This is a short list. There are many, many other Twitter tools. If someone finds one useful that I haven’t mentioned, please share and explain how you use it.

These are my favorite Twitter-related tools:

search.twitter.com: Basically, it’s a tool to search the Twitterverse. I find often it works better than doing a Google search because it gives you results of what’s happening now — not results of recent stories or blog posts.

Here’s how I use it:

• Search by Twitter name. I search by my Twitter name,  bloggingmom67, almost daily to see if people have responded to my tweets (so I can answer back) or retweeted my tweets, so I can thank them. This builds your engagement in Twitter. (You can also search by other people’s names to see what they are tweeting or retweeting.

• Search for a topic. If I’m blogging about the single mom in California who recently had octuplets, I can use the search function to find what other bloggers are saying about her. Google searches tend to turn up news sites first, not blogs. Twitter often turns up blogs, first. As I’ve mentioned before, linking to other blogs in your niche can help build your community of readers and increase the chance other bloggers will link to you — which ups your value in the eyes of Google. I also use this feature to see what topics are getting a buzz.

• Search for city or town where you live or work. This is something I do only occasionally to see what people are saying about my community. It could lead to story/blog post ideas or tips on people to follow.

• Check trending topics: This application gives a list of what topics are popular on Twitter at that very moment, which can be useful. And it includes hashtags that are trending. Hashtags are a pound sign before a word; people use it to aggregate all the tweets on a subject in one page. #cny, for example, aggregates all the tweets about Central New York, where I live, on a page that people can follow. If you’re looking for tweets on a particular hashtag, such as #inaug09, you can plug it into this application and find what people are saying.

Twittergrader.com:  There’s more to this than just a grade.

Here’s how I use it:

• Get your grade: OK, I’m kind of very competitive, so I like knowing my grade.  You plug in your Twitter name and get a grade, based on the number of followers you have, the power of this network, the pace of your updates and the completeness of your profile. It’s intended to measure your power in the Twitterverse.  Best is 100 percent. It’s fun to see your number go up.

• Find followers: The best part of Twitter.grader is it recommends followers to you. If you grade yourself once a month and follow even a quarter of the folks Twitter grader tells you to follow, you’ll increase your power in the Twitterverse rather quickly.

• Find people to follow in your community: Instead of plugging in your Twitter name, use the search function and type in the name of your town/city. You’ll find out your reach in that community, and get some valuable suggestions of local folks to follow.

Retweet Rank: Retweeting is when one person copies what someone else tweets and tweets it again, usually crediting the original tweet. (The format is: RT: @bloggingmom67 means someone is retweeting my tweet.)

Here’s how I use this tool:

• Find people to follow: This tool give a list of the ever-changing  top 10 people whose tweets get retweeted the most. These are good people to follow because they have a lot of credibility in the twitterverse. Plus, if they retweet the blog post link you tweeted, you’re going to get a rush of traffic, because people listen to them. (It has happened to me, and it’s pretty darn amazing.)

• Find own rank: This is more in the category of interesting, not necessary. But it’s good to know your rank if your goal is to increase it. If people regularly retweet your tweeted blog links, you get more bang for your buck on Twitter.

Twitscoop: This application gives you the scoop on what’s hot on Twitter at that very moment. (It’s similar to search.twitter.com, but it pulls up different stuff on occasion, so I find it useful to check both.)

Here’s how I use this tool:

• Check what’s buzzing: You can type in a topic or keyword to see what people are saying about it. Up will pop tweets on the subject, but the coolest part is you’ll get a graph showing how the tweets on the topic are increasing or decreasing over the past six hours. It’s helpful because if you’re blogging on that topic, you want to hit it when it’s hot.

– Gina

(Follow me on Twitter)