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You run a start-up social venture. You need a supportive network. You need marketing. You need to connect with your industry’s guru. And you need it all now, conveniently, and free.  Two years ago, you’d be totally unreasonable. Now, you just hop on twitter.

Not taking advantage of all that twitter has to offer is probably one of the biggest mistakes you could make early on as a start-up social venture. Everyone who is anyone in your field is on twitter. And twitter actually gives you the chance to do them favors. Think about all the free marketing you could provide Ashoka or the Acumen Fund by retweeting their messages to your followers. The more followers you have and the more they trust you, the bigger the favor. Eventually, you might warm up even the most remote, inaccessible experts in your field to the possibility of exchanging a few emails or even phone calls!

Connecting with people over twitter is exactly like connecting with people in real life (see last week’s blog post). If it’s really going to be something valuable for you (i.e. connecting you with the right people), it boils down to asking yourself how you can help your loyal followers. This simple question has enabled us to grow our followership at a rate of 500 new followers each month. All it takes is 30 minutes a day. That’s 30 minutes that enables you to help others, market your brand, become an expert in your field, and build genuine relationships with people you want to connect with! Here’s how to do it!

1. Pick an information niche. Choose a very narrow field and tweet about that and virtually nothing else. For us @BeUnreasonable, we tweet about how social entrepreneurship can be used to create high-impact solutions to the world’s biggest problems. We try to answer questions like “How can I start a social enterprise?”, “What have proven, high-impact social enterprises done to effectively address social/environmental problems?” and “How can social entrepreneurs gain access to the resources they need to make their social enterprise successful?”

2. Become a gatekeeper. Anyone in your niche has access to the same information that you do. That’s exactly the problem. Few people have the time to go through it and discern what’s useful and what’s junk. Using Twitter, you have an incredible opportunity to address this “pain in the market.” Filter information so others don’t have to, constantly guided by asking yourself “what is valuable to people in this information niche?” If you do it well over time, people will come to regard you as an “expert gatekeeper of information.” They’ll start coming to you first before pouring through endless streams of articles all over the internet.

3. Make information come to you. To make it easy on yourself, rely on your own gatekeepers. Don’t waste too much time searching for information. Make information come to you by using an RSS feed (I use Google reader). Identify some of the best sources of information in your particular information niche (a few blogs in my Google Reader include Entreprenur Magazine, Change.org, Good Magazine, Seth Godin’s Blog, and NextBillion). Every morning, thanks to Google Reader, I’m able to go through over 20 blogs and pick out the best 5 articles 15 minutes. This process benefits me independently of tweeting since I quickly get updated about all the happenings of the social enterprise space.

4. Auto-Pilot. You want to be visibly reliable. That means tweeting several times a day. But how can you do that without wasting your whole day, ensuring that you are able to space out your tweets for maximum visibility? Get a free account with a service like SocialOomph (formerly TweetLater), which allows you to schedule your tweets. I spend 15 minutes reading through articles and another 15 scheduling tweets for throughout the day.

5. Always give credit. If you really want to develop a following, avoid self-marketing and focus most of your posts on retweeting. Whenever you tweet anything, make a serious effort to give your source(s) of information credit. Include both the author of the content and the source if possible (e.g. “An example tweet” by @author via @source). If you find information that didn’t come through twitter, search for the author’s name in google to find if they have a twitter account (i.e. type in “John Doe twitter”). You’ll find this helps you to connect with the people you credit, that it boosts your credibility as a tweeter, and that people are grateful (so they are more likely to follow you). To quote Guy Kawasaki (who has over 176,000 twitter followers), “retweeting is the best form of flattery these days.” Even Guy loves having his messages spread virally. If you really want to do your favorite tweeters a favor, recommend them to your followers with the #followfriday or #ff hashtags (e.g. “For great #socent tweets, check out @socialedge #ff). All the marketing you provide others on twitter helps you build up credibility and improves your ability to contact your niche’s experts.

6. Listen to your followers. Give new followers the opportunity to tell themselves about you over direct message. Never start a connection over twitter by directing people to your website or asking them to support your blitzkrieg fundraising campaign. Ask them what lights them on fire and what they want to learn more about. Through this feedback, you KNOW what your followers find interesting (which can guide what you tweet about). If you learn about a follower whose passions align with yours, you may strike up an email conversation or even a phone call that leads to a meaningful relationship! Some of our best connections with potential Unreasonable Fellows, mentors, and pipeline partners happened thanks to a few direct message exchanges.

7. Make it easy for others. The viral component of twitter is its concision. You can pour through enormous quantities of information at a blazing pace and make decisions about what you want to learn more about, what you want to share with your followers, and who you want to connect with. Make it easy for people to make the decision to share your tweets and to connect with you. Shorten your tweets so that others can retweet them without edits (don’t exceed more than about 120 characters). Use hashtags so people can quickly identify what you’re generally talking about (we often use #socent for “social entrepreneurship and #bop for “bottom of the pyramid”) and find your tweets when they search in a specific information niche. Follow people back so they continue to follow you (though not blindly – with automated follow on, you’ll find you pick up a good number of scantily-clad women and money-laundering schemes). A little twitter thoughtfulness goes a long way!

So What? Ultimately, if used right, twitter gives you the chance to connect with the most savvy, knowledgeable people in the space you’re passionate about. When you provide those in your field value consistently, you gain their trust as a source of information. With that trust, you have a credible brand that even the giants of your field recognize (and have benefited from, since you’ve been retweeting them). By using twitter well, you develop a supportive network to which you can market, learn from, share resources with, and team up with to systematically tackle the world’s greatest threats.

We’d love to hear your stories of great twitter connections, other tips you have for using twitter, your vitriolic distaste for our suggestions, and all other relevant thoughts in the comments section!