Here's how you can be your best Twitter self in 140 characters or less.

1. Choose your league. Once you begin to grasp the particularities of Twitter, a winning strategy would be to set a certain ‘mood’ for yourself on the platform. Choose your dominant tone (professional, sarcastic, funny…) and main interests and pick up your journey from there.

2. Build a distinctive persona. While you might find yourself trying to blend in with the crowd at a first stage, you should constantly strive to find your voice and distinguish yourself from the 305 million other monthly active users on the platform because this is what will ultimately get people to follow you and interact with you.

3. Tweet with moderation. Yes, you need to tweet regularly in order to maintain your status. No, you should not be spamming people’s timelines with a debilitating flood of links and hashtags.

4. Keep away from petty Twitter fights. Twitter rants may sound fun for the first couple minutes but you’ll soon realize they’re not worth your time/tweets. Some users have got into the annoying habit of ‘scoring point’ against each other to prove their proficiency in a certain field or back up their rigid opinions. Do NOT become one of them. Be peaceful and open to opposing views.

5. Watch out for occasional emotional outbursts. Due to the instant, chronological nature of the platform itself, you will eventually get to a point where all you want is to throw a whole batch of complaints/emotionally-charged statements at the face of the Internet to let out your anger/indignation. But make sure not to take it into ‘drama queen’ levels!

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6. Filter things out. If you happen to go on an anger-charged rant as depicted above, try to soak up excess emotions by deleting superfluous tweets in a timely manner. Keep an eye on your timeline periodically to equally filter out content you think no longer reflects you.

7. Do not overdo it with hashtags. Most popular hashtags become trending for a few hours and then fade away. Do not participate in a hashtag that doesn’t relate to you in any way/that you don’t understand just by means of gaining more visibility. It’s usually not worth it.

8. Watch your grammar. The 140-character limit is by no means an excuse for poor grammar. Read your tweets before posting them to prevent any flagrant typos/sentence structure defects.

9. Be kind and consistent. And make sure to have fun with it!

Cover credit: Cloudfront.net (full link)