To be a good Twitter steward, you need to follow the unwritten “rules” of the game. No, they didn’t come down off a mountain chiseled on stone tablets. Yes, the rules sometimes change as social sites become ever more intricate and savvy. But here are our most basic and important “Ten Commandments” of Twitter to keep you growing and thriving and building your tribe in the Twitterverse!

DO: Cull from others! Not only can we learn a great deal from actually reading the tweets of others, we can frankly learn a great deal from their own Twitter home pages. If you have a favorite author, you can see how often they’re tweeting, what they’re tweeting, who they’re following and who follows them (and choose to follow any of the same folks). It’s like free marketing intel on steroids — yet very few take advantage of the readily available information.

DO: Tweet regularly. Too much lag time between tweets won’t get you seen much and won’t encourage new folks to follow you.

DO: Be original, interesting and helpful. i.e., sharing sites or blogs or articles that might interest your followers, whether that’s on topics/issues you deal with in  your book(s) or areas of interest you regularly write on, or issues at play in the book you’re currently writing!

DO: Use Twitter as a “news portal.” You can announce your own news and relevant new from others. Likewise, you can find news on your interest areas just by typing a keyword into the search field.

DO: Follow new people every day. Building who you follow builds who follows you; it’s as simple as that. A few a day takes less time than it took to type this sentence, but they sure add up over a year! And remember, the bigger your audience, the more people you can announce a new release or a book signing or share a good review with. It’s much more fun to shout our news from the rooftop when we know there’s a crowd standing below.

DO RETWEET! Retweeting on Twitter (there’s a button at the end of each tweet that makes that as easy as can be and it’s the ultimate compliment you can pay a tweet that you like and wish to share with your own followers. It’s useful to you, generous to others, and makes folks want to reciprocate by retweeting your valuable content.

DO: Use Lists. The Twitter list function lets you place the people you follow on “Lists” which makes navigating around Twitter infinitely more productive. In example, if you’ve built a list of literary agents and just want to see what agents are tweeting about on your next visit to Twitter, you can click on that list and viola — just Tweets from the folks on that list appear.

Hint: Check out our lists at twitter.com/WhereWritersWin for examples – We have lists that include agents, editors, publishers, bookstores, authors, author resources, etc. so we can view and engage with just the folks we want to, when we want to, without slogging through hundreds of fellow Tweeters to find what we’re looking for.

DON’T: Overweet. If you’re the New York Times, yes, you probably have a lot to tweet about; if not, don’t push it. Most folks don’t really care what you had for lunch (unless you’re heartily recommending a MUST-DO restaurant) or if you got your laundry done (unless it’s on the way to be knighted by the Queen for your remarkable writing). Some personal stuff is great (fans want to know more about you), but leave out the mundane. We all scrub floors; it’s likely not so interesting to us when you do, too.

DON’T: Constantly shout, “Look at me, look at me” in the Twitter space. It’s great to market yourself, talk about your book, post your latest blog, etc., but overselling yourself will get you un-followed fast, especially if you’re not sharing other content in between. Most savvy marketers have a 1:10 ratio, meaning, they’ll share their own news only in between a lot of other shares and retweets of other informative posts.

DON’T BE CRUEL. Hearken back to those old words of wisdom — If you can’t say something nice… Look, an occasional outcry at injustice is great (and often humorous). But consistent 140 character bitch fests will get you labeled a whiner, and un-followed faster than you can say, “I didn’t mean it, really!”

When in doubt, follow the examples of other expert Tweeters (especially those in the social marketing fields who are helping set the “rules.” Keep it light, have fun, but know that Twitter is an underestimated and extremely powerful tool in your author marketing toolkit.

Do you have a favorite Twitter rule you live by? Share it with us!