There are lots of really great advanced articles out there about how to use Social CRM for your business and how to get retweeted but many of them take it for granted that you’ve already mastered some of the basic understanding and use cases for the technology. Below are 5 things I learned the hard way, from being an active personal and professional user. These are things I wish someone had just told me so I could have saved time learning them myself!

1) Tweets should never be more than 120 characters.

Yes, I said 120 characters, that was not a typo. If you want your content to be passed around you need to leave space for people to @someoneelse, or #something or write a comment. If you’ve actively retweeted then you know what a pain it is once the @name is added in and suddenly it’s too long or there’s no space left for what you want to say. And you should absolutely be able to retweet without going over the character limit!

2) Let people know when you retweet their content, repost their articles or blog about them.

Despite all the many awesome systems that exist to allow you to monitor your Social CRM, we’re all busy people and things slip through the cracks. Whenever I blog about another company I always tweet the article to them so they can see it. They always love it, and are grateful and most often promote that content to their lists. Some of my best online relationships have been built this way.These relationships are really valuable because they expand your network and your sphere of influence so take the time to let people know that you are talking about them!

3) It’s ok to have a work profile and a personal profile.

I think at the beginning of Social Media use having two profiles seemed somehow deceptive. That’s not the case anymore! People who care about small business and marketing and want to follow the high quality content I provide don’t need to know where I check in on fourssquare or the fact that I love fashion blogs. They really don’t need to know that my old highschool soccer team member just found me because they wrote something on my wall. I have two Facebook Profiles, two LinkedIn profiles and  a personal twitter account in addition to @WorkingPoint. This means that should I move on to a different job or role in the company all my efforts wont be lost because someone else can take over the professional accounts I’ve created. I still end up using both accounts for professional reasons so I can access my netoworks but I can keep my professional accounts clean and professional (and I don’t bore my friends to death obsessing about marketing for small businesses!).

4) Being cryptic only works if you’re a celebrity.

If you’re not a celebrity people aren’t really going to spend time trying to figure out what you are talking about. Think about what you know about paper titles from high school, email subject lines, or headlines from newspapers of articles you would want to read and then write accordingly.

5) There is such thing as sharing too much information.

I am all for transparency, honesty and being genuine. I enjoy reading about things people are eating (I love food), restaurants, movies they have seen, technology they like, fashion, and other consumer goods (this information is useful!). People will unfollow or unfriend if you riddle them with too much, whether it be in content or frequency.