MindThe Beginner

I have talked about mental mountains before, those peaks in success that we want to climb. For most these peaks are dreams, for some goals and for the happy few they are reality.

Twitter as you probably know is a social media tool that exploded onto the Internet a while ago and has been a great success. It’s almost unheard of to not an account there. If you watch CNN you can’t even get around twitter anymore because they use it as a source of information to see what’s trending at the moment.

Twitter has become mainstream and all over the world millions of people are following each other. Mostly just for the social chat but there is some serious business going on as well. Social media are an easy way to promote yourself or your business and to meet up with other people, twitter gives us the added bonus that we learn how to say just about anything in 140 characters or less. Great for productivity, not so great for people who want to share their life stories.

Twitter is a very powerful tool to climb your mountains with. To harness that power you need three things:

1. A twitter account
2. Socializing skills
3. A little spare time to tweet in

Let’s state the obvious first

Getting followers on you twitter account is slow at first. The first 100 people you follow are probably people you know directly through blogs, other sites and perhaps real life. Some follow you back. You have made a beginning and start to socialize. The more you tweet the more chance you have of being retweeted. Your name reaches people you don’t follow yet and who don’t follow you. Have your name pop up often enough and you’ll get more followers.

Getting a retweet does involve you actually adding something to the community. You do that by being interesting and helpful. If you keep that up more people will flock to your banner. Your name gets out there and the ball starts rolling faster and faster until you get dozens of new followers a day. People will recommend you through #followfriday and you’ll get even more followers. (And hints on who to follow yourself)

Being helpful

Being helpful to others is what climbing mountains is all about. Someone asks a question through twitter and you answer it. If you think you can answer a question and your answer will be helpful try to always answer. Again, this gets your name out there and gets you recognized as a helpful person who doesn’t use twitter solely to promote yourself.

The more you help people the more followers you get, got it?

The power of twitter: All you have to do is ask.

The power is with the followers

And now they key to all this. If you have 1000 followers and you have a question, even if just 1% of those people can help you, you end up with 100 answers to your question. Not every answer will be great but combined they will get you another step towards the top of your mountain.

Ask to be retweeted and you will be. (seriously!) Reaching even more people who haven’t heard of you yet. Given enough time and skill you’ll rise through the “ranks” of twitter and come up top somewhere with thousands of followers who want to help you whenever they can.

The wider the base of followers the higher you can get. Logically maybe one person in a thousand will be able to help you in such a way that you leap forward. Having thousands of followers means several leaps. Getting you up your mountain that much faster.

Try to be that one in a thousand person every time you help someone. When the time comes they will remember you and do whatever they can to return the favor.

More reading on mental mountains:

Is that a mountain?

Stand still please, the future will still be there tomorrow

The three essentials of an uphill struggle

The truth about positivity, stop dreaming!

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