This week, BusinessWeek published a list of 50 Twittering CEOs, featuring who they like to follow and how it helps them run their business. The result is some very sound advice for people on all rungs of the corporate ladder, which made me think of these ten specific ways you can Twitter like a CEO.

1. Follow Back: Founder of Alltop.com @guykawasaki says he follows everyone back as a courtesey so that they can direct message him if need be. While he admittedly doesn’t have time to read the stream for his 100,000-some followers, he should be applauded for opening up and being accessible to his followers.

2. Create relationships with your customers: Build Direct President & CEO @jeffbooth engages with his Twitter followers and tries to be useful, rather than trying to sell them. This giving attitude has helped him to create relationships with customers who he couldn’t ordinarily.

3. Reward your customers: Mike Ferrari, Co-founder of @SmartyPig, a social media online savings site, uses Twitter to run monthly contests to reward customers for reaching their savings goals.

4. Publicity: @CommunispaceCEO Diane Hessan gets the word out about her company through Twitter. She says announcing her company’s new blog to her followers resulted in 1,000 visits that day.

5. Put a face on your company: JibberJobber.com CEO @JasonAlba tweets to put a face to his online company, which offers career resources. He freely uses his personaly to extend a personality to his company.

6. Employee relations: Twitter helps @tombed, CEO of AKQA, the global digital marketing and tech firm, talk to his more than 750 employees spread out over six offices across the world.

7. Listen to customers: @lebrun CEO of social media monitoring company Radian6 uses Twitter to listen to his customers, naturally. He practices “listening to the point of need,” in which he focuses on answering questions, delivering a solution and adding value to his followers.

8. Establish corporate culture: One of the first CEOs to embrace Twitter, Tony Hsieh of @zappos, started using Twitter to build the company culture among employees. Little did he know his customers would also catch on - to the tune of more than half a million followers.

9. Connecting: President of PerkettPR, @missusP uses Twitter to connect her company and its clients with opportunities - particularly media opporunities (like the BusinessWeek article as it turns out)!

10. Staying on the Cutting Edge: Like many companies, CEO of Socialtext @eugenelee uses Twitter to find, translate and rebroadcast interesting news and trends in his industry that helps his company stay current and position him as an authority.

Photo by: sub.site

Because many experts have already addressed this subject in the blogosphere, I  won’t waste your time beating around the bush. There are a few, textbook, terrible things that you can do to ensure that influential tweets won’t follow you back. Keep in mind, social networking can be a trial and error type of process but if you want to get people talking about (and not mocking) your brand or message in the Twittervese, do not take on the following nasty habits.

No Profile/no photo
Having no profile or no photo says to me, “I’m pretty guarded. I’ll try this Twitter thing, but I’m not going to put my WHOLE LIFE on there!” That’s pretty over dramatic and says that you’re not interested in getting to know me, or any of your other followers for that matter.

Protected profile
If I don’t know you, I won’t request to follow you. There could be 1,000 reasons you feel the need to protect your lame Twitter updates - you’re on the lam, you’re in the witness protection program, you’re slandering your girlfriend, Samantha Ronson - and I don’t want to get mixed up in any of that.

Sex Pot name/photo
Unless you’re 19 and in a sorority, there is no reason to have the following words in your twitter handle: candy, kitten, hunny or angel. Also, if your photo looks like it could be the profile picture for a website that charges by the minute, you’re not getting followed back.

Cat got your profile?
For the most part, I won’t follow you if you have a photo of a cat as your profile pic. This just really freaks me out. Human photo is better than a pet photo, which is better than a logo.

Banned words
If you use the words: inspirational, goal, dream, leader, winning, guru, make-money-online, addict, expert, audit, network, free report, marketer or extraordinaire, I won’t follow you back.

#tcot
If you use up 5 of the 160 characters permitted in your profile to let me know that you are one of the “Top Conservatives on Twitter,” and you’re not John McCain or Michael Steele, you might be seriously deluded. This applies to other self-important hashtags as well.

Following fanatic
If I can tell from your last few status updates that you’re only interested in getting more followers, you probably won’t have me to add to the pack.

(In need of) Retail therapy
If you use your Twitter page to link to your online store and you have nothing to else to offer, I can’t offer myself as your newest follower.

I’m a celebrity, get me out of here

If you are a celebrity and you have 1,522,398 followers and you’re only following 137 people back it’s terrible twittiquete. I don’t care how interesting you are (Ashton Kutcher) or how many times your promote your tweeting on the Ellen Show (Diddy).

Essentially, you have the best chance of being followed back if you do the opposite of the activities mentioned above - be open, put yourself out there, be cautiously intimate, don’t hard-sell your product or service, be useful and please, please don’t use cat profile pictures. And when in doubt, use some of Talk’s best Twitter resources here, here, here and here.

Photo by: kopp0041