editione1.0.1
Updated January 28, 2020First and foremost, be kind and gracious. Donโt be the person who adds negativity to someoneโs comments or makes them less willing to share their ideas in the first place.
Yes, and. Overall, heed Michael Nielsenโs suggestion and use a โYes, andโฆโ approach (a common improv mantra) on Twitter. Rather than tearing down the ideas that people share, build them up by adding your own views and experiences.
Express appreciation or agreement. If someone posts something useful or interesting, or that mirrors or challenges your own thoughts and experiences, this is a simple way of saying thanks and encouraging them to post more.
Ask questions in the replies. Do this when you have a genuine query about a personโs tweet that you feel others might have too, not as a form of engagement-bait. Ask questions that prompt someone to provide additional information and deepen understanding; good questions show a non-surface interest in the topic. Your questions can yield an interesting response and may bring up a point of clarification that will benefit others. Rather than challenging someoneโs position, you might phrase your perspective as a question:
When prompted by someone to answer a specific question, do so. Prompts from those you follow can be an exercise in clarifying your own thinking and seeing how you converge or diverge from others. Answer open-ended questions thoughtfully and truthfully.
Provide further recommendations and reading. If someone tweets praise for a book, artist, company, or whatever, it can be simple and helpful to suggest, โIf you like this, you might like this.โ Helping someone broaden their knowledge on a subject theyโre interested in is often welcome.
Be a connector. Itโs easy to get siloed off on Twitter. Helping people create connections can be quick and informal and doesnโt necessitate the overhead of a double-opt in format over email. It can be as simple as โ@user and I were talking about this, they have interesting thoughts that you can find here(link).โ
Be patient. Whether youโre leaving a thoughtful comment or asking a specific question, itโs important to do so without the expectation of a response. If youโre replying to the tweet of someone with a significant number of followers, itโs likely theyโre bombarded with comments and questions all day. Good questions will often yield likes as people signal they have the same one, making a response much more likely. Questions are then both personally helpful and also valuable to other followers.
Weโll cover dealing with negativity on Twitter later, but you can do your own big part by not contributing to the platformโs toxicity.
Donโt be negative. While being kind but critical in conversation is fine, being overly cynical on Twitter is off-putting to othersโthereโs rarely an opportunity to go back and explain โwhat you really meant.โ
Donโt be pedantic or nit-picky. Everyone is working under the same 280 character limit when theyโre sharing ideas. This leaves little room for nuance, so try to assume good intentions. If you need something clarified, ask. Being reductive or picking apart ideas is viewed as annoying. Try not to say things like, โYou probably havenโt consideredโฆ,โ or any reply that starts with, โWell actuallyโฆโ