I joined Twitter with the early adopters, but I never figured out what I wanted to do with it. About a year and a half ago, I looked at my nearly empty twitter account that had been languishing for I don’t know how long. I considered deleting it, but instead decided to use it as a tool to collect my thoughts. I’d like to share my  3 tips for getting started on Twitter.

1. Find your topic
Users on Twitter will look for other users to follow based on their existing tweets. If you’re generally posting about topics they are interested in, they will follow up or add you to one of their lists. While you might also have 1:1 interactions with other users and some personalized messages in your feed that reflect your personality, your topic should be pretty easy to catch onto in your first 10-15 tweets in your feed at any given time.

2. Set your routine
I read every day. Mostly, I read blogs and articles, but I am also an avid book reader. Since this was something that was already part of my routine, it was just another step to start tweeting things that I found interesting in what I was reading. I would quote writers, link to blogs I liked and share Infographics that I found useful or entertaining. The problem with that was I would find all my tweets were between 9 and 11 pm, sometimes even later. Also, my tweets would come all at once and I quickly found that I was spamming anyone who was following me.

3. Use other tools
It is never nice to spam your followers. If you’re going to tweet more than once or twice a day, use a service to queue up your tweets. I started with Hootsuite, but I didn’t love the interface. I needed something super simple and quick. I finally found Buffer App. I was on the free service for a very long time, which limited how many posts I could queue up, but it was sufficient and allowed me to schedule my tweets so that I was still sharing what I read, but it was at a more appropriate hour and not all at once. I eventually upgraded to the pro service that is $10/month, which I have not regretted one bit. (I am not being paid to recommend this service.) Find a service that works well with your routine and you don’t have to actually be on a timer to tweet at certain times of the day. No one should ever be so attached to social media that this is the case.

With just these three minor changes, I went from nearly zero tweets to over 2,800 in about a year and a half. I didn’t even have to spend all day tweeting. You can be active on Twitter and still enjoy life tweet free for a while.