 "St Peter's Twitter Gospel")
• Remember Follow
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Fridays and keep them holy.
• As ye tweet, thus shall ye be retweeted.
• Thou shalt not stalk thy neighbour’s followers in the hope that they follow ye.
• Thou shalt not plug thy status updates into Facebook, that barren land of nonbelievers & quiz-takers.
• Thou shalt not bear false witness. That includes tweeting stuff you only actually saw on TV.
• Honour thy father and thy mother. What happens at home shalt not be tweeted. (Unless, of course, thy parents tweeted first). (You *really* shouldn’t have got them on to Twitter, y’know.)
• Thou shalt get back to work, hm?
• Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s ass. Well, okay, maybe if s/he’s really callipygous.
• If ye seek to be retweeted, ye shall ensure that thy tweets have enough characters left over to permit it.
• Thou shalt casually mention @gulpanag ">@gulpanag in thy tweets, as if you’re, like, friends and all.
• Thou shalt quit while thou art ahead.
• Thou shalt not relentlessly pimp thy blog.
• Retweeting yourself - or RTing what others tweet to you - is bad form. Only SEOs do that.
Peter Griffin is Editor, Special Features, at Forbes India and ForbesLife India. He also handles social media for both publications. In previous lives, he was a space seller, PR consultant, advertising creative director, voice-over artist, RJ, TV host, web producer and content architect, freelance travel writer, columnist, consultant to NGOs, some of them simultaneously and often for real folding money. He has blogged since 2003, and has co-founded the South-East Asia Tsunami & Earthquake and Mumbai Help blogs (which, with other similar initiatives later became the WorldWideHelp group and the writers’ community, Caferati. He is a keen student of collaboration and online culture. He also writes poetry, and is inordinately proud of having got paid for a few poems. He is @zigzackly on Twitter.