[Before I begin, I do want to point out that most, if not all of this post, may not come as that much of a surprise to you if you are more of a "seasoned, savvy, social media geek," but even so, hopefully this article will provide (or at least reinforce) some good ideas and things to keep in mind regarding using Twitter! Please share any comments you may have below, and thanks for reading!]

1) Provide consistently relevant and useful tweets (of course, you are human, and it’s good to even “show you are human” sometimes and post non-usual, hyper-utilitarian type tweets from time to time, but keep those to a minimum (at least if you have more “professional goals” for your twitter account. My suggestion would be to, if you want to make more personal-oriented type tweets to set up a personal twitter account for that).

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2) I like to check the most recent page of the user’s tweets for relevance, if you don’t see something that looks useful to you personally in the first (most recent) page of their tweets, then why would you want to follow that person?

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3) Check the user’s link Worth it isn’t it to see if their content is actually something you’re going to want to be following??

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4) Be on the lookout for “spammy-looking” posts on their ‘Updates’ list (personally, I won’t follow someone with repeated tweets, i.e. the user making the same tweet on the page more than once, long list of @this and @thats, etc).

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5) This is maybe one of the most, if not the most important thing to do to get top quality linkups on Twitter: look at the friend lists of the top people you most admire, and see who THEY are following, and follow them .

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6) I kind of don’t like to say this in a way, but of course it would make sense that if you do follow people who have a massive number of followers, your chances of gaining new followers yourself would be higher. [On a related note I will say that, although I have not yet tried those "get 5,000 followers in 5 mins" sites, I suppose they do work, but my assumption would be that, in order for them to work, you must have to let the service provider have you automatically follow random people, so, regardless, is something you'd really want to do?]

There are other tips and tricks to to get more followers, but really I would say” “QUALITY OVER QUANTITY,” and I would tend to shy away from “get more followers now” things, in the same way that I shy away from the multitude of those “get rich quick,” “make money working from home” etc claims. I really don’t think it is worth TOO much time going overboard to try to get a massive number of new followers on Twitter; a much better philosophy I would say would be to focus on continually providing quality content, messages, and overall communication stemming from your website or business, and gain more followers who you would actually want to talk with or with whom you could form truly potentially valuable partnerships!

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7) Follow back those peeps who are following you whom you think are relevant! The reason for this would be three-fold: first, it is a kind of courtesy thing to return the favor for the fact that they followed you. Secondly, if these people found you on their own, if you follow them, there is a good chance that more of THEIR friends might be potential followers of you, and even more importantly, potential QUALITY CONTACTS! And last but not least, it will save you time looking for quality people to follow huh! :p

*One more point on the subject of “Twitter etiquette? “twittiquette? is that too far with the geekery? haha. CITE YOUR SOURCES! Both in retweets (“RE @personwhopostedthisarticle”) and web site name/url that originally published the article, whenever you can fit them within the 140 character allotment.

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8] Post more tweets.
Just like a regular website, TV show, magazine, or news publication, the more content you can provide readers (and potential readers) – and the more often you update – the greater the chance will be that your posts will actually get read, and read by a wider audience (just please don’t spam, for the sake of all of us! Quality & extremely busy netizens have a low tolerance for spam ,

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9) If you are on the fence about whether to follow someone or not, just follow or don’t follow!
You can always “unfollow” the person later if you like, right?!

Last thing I want to point out, remember that Twitter (at least for now, unless it goes on to take over the entire Internet as a whole, which would seem pretty unlikely!) is only one potential channel of communication for your social network building. Remember that there are still MILLIONS of users on a bevvy of other social network sites (Digg, Flickr, MySpace, Facebook, all the rest), and that sites like MySpace, though a lot of geeks are stating it is done for, still has huge potential (obviously) especially for those of us working within the music, arts, and entertainment fieds.

OK well hope that can provide you with a little bit of my own personal insight, please share any comments you have below, and good luck and wishes to you all! .