Your personal tweets should have meaning to your audience. Tweet about issues that are fairly universal to your list of followers and that will make them feel welcome to reply to with their own comments.

"People's Twitter streams are uninteresting if they're just declarative sentences like 'I'm going to the movies' or 'it's gray outside,'" Boyd says. "It's better if it's something that people might feel interested in replying to."

4. Reciprocate Gracefully

Advice on using social media outlets is often served up with a slew of jargony slogans like "engage with the community" or "build your social capital." But sometimes what that means can be unclear, especially on a service like Twitter, which is still relatively young.

So more to the point: how do you become respected by the community and benefit from the give-and-take that happens between users on Twitter?