Nate Riggs: Social Business Strategies; communication, social web strategies, & passion in Columbus, Ohio.

One of the nuances of microblogs, like Twitter, is understanding that your messages have the potential to spread like wildfire – at times, reaching thousands, if not millions of receivers.

But what can you do to enable such rapid dispersion?  For the most part, Twitter creates a relatively friendly environment, where simply being helpful is rewarded.  Making it easy for your followers to help you, and giving them something to talk about, will go a long way.

Here’s some of the things I do to make it easier for my followers to help me.  Feel free to use these ideas and, by all means, add your own to the list:

1. Less is more. You have 140 characters available. If possible, cut that number in half or, at the least, by two-thirds.  You’ll get more ReTweet’s (RTs) that way.
2. Be a teacher. If you see someone who writes a post they obviously want to spread, but they’re not follow idea 1, help them out.  Find a way to cut down their tweet, without diluting the message.  Then, ReTweet it.
3. Tweet more often. But, always make sure that your messages continuously add value to the conversation.  Higher frequency, when used wisely, will help accelerate your reach on the social graph.  Think about how fast Tweets disappear in your All Friends stream.  More frequency results in higher visibility for your content.  I use TweetStats to benchmark myself on Twitter.
4. Find your cadence.  Try tweeting at relatively even intervals.  I often see people catching up on 5-10 tweets at a time (and I know I’m guilty of this as well), but I definitely do not condone it. Tweeting in heavy blasts can flood the streams of your followers and push them to stop following you.  Find your rhythm.
5. Have leathery skin.  Poking fun can be easily misread in the context Twitter, so don’t get too upset about any specific comments made.  There’s always a good chance that the way a message is read was not how the sender intended.
6. Smiles are gold.  They are literally text-based facial expressions.  Using bars, parentheses and other punctuation can also indicate nonverbal signals. Don’t be afraid to experiment.
7. Change your avatar.  Your image on Twitter doesn’t necessarily have to be a head shot.  Be creative and change it up every few weeks.  The more images you use, the more pictures of you could be potentially indexed on a name search in Google.
8. Talk to people.  While it wasn’t the initial intention, Twitter has become about conversations.  Would you walk into a cocktail party and say random things directed at no one?  Probably not.  People would probably think you were a little nuts.  Enough said.
9. Snapshots in time. Share glimpses of your life.  These don’t have to be staged shots either.  Think in terms of capturing small, important moments of time that give people a lens into your daily routine.  I’ve shared pictures of a pretty evening skyline, or even my favorite place to run.  Shots from the dog park or my kids always get Replies.  So what is it for you?  Do you garden or paint?  Do you have a classic car or ride mountain bikes?  Show people images that create an emotion in you.
10. Your turn.  This bullet is for you.  What have you been trying that seems to be working?  What have you figured out?  You’re a smart communicator, so go ahead and show us your stuff!

P.S.  You can always follow me as well

Photo credit: Mark Grabanski’s blog