How Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) Uses Twitter

On March 12th at Pubcon, I had the priviledge of interviewing Matt Cutts for our video series called How I Use Twitter. Here are the notes:

User: Matt Cutts
Company: Google
Title: the head of Google's Webspam team
iPhone client: TwitterPhone
Follows: About 100 People
Followers: About 17,000 (as of March 12, 2009)
Using since: mid-2008
PC Client: Twitter.com
URL Shortener: Bit.ly
Tweets Out: 6-7 per day
Time spent: Not much.

Quote: “It’s just like a river. If something interesting comes by you can pick it, pass it on, reply to it, and if you’re too busy, it’s OK and nobody is going to be offended by that.”

Tip: Keep your tweet 14 characters short of the max so that people can easily retweet it. (Ben adds: Add up the characters in your Twitter username and then add 5 and that should be enough for a retweet. So, for benfinklea, it would be 10 + 5 = 15. RT @benfinklea )

How to retweet: “RT @mattcutts” or “via @mattcutts”

Tip: Use hashtags (# symbol) to tweet about events, like Pubcon. You would put #pubcon. That people people could search for that event to see what’s going on at that event.

Tip: Use Twitter for reputation management. Go to search.twitter.com and put in your username or your name and you’ll see what people are saying about you.