Anya Weber is @anyaweber on Twitter. She lives in Boston.

No one is more awesome at harnessing the still-mysterious power of Twitter than musician Amanda Palmer.

Sure, Ashton Kutcher has more followers. As I write this, 358,483 people are following @amandapalmer, while Kutcher (@aplusk) has about four million more than that. But even though Kutcher’s playing to a bigger crowd, I’m not sure he’s seen the results Palmer has.

I’m not getting paid to promote Palmer here. I’ve never met her, and haven’t heard much of her music (either with her band the Dresden Dolls or her solo material). But I am a huge admirer of how she uses Twitter to connect and grow her fan base, to make herself money, and generally to have a blast. We can’t all be rock stars, but we can all learn a lot from Palmer about effective tweetage.

1. Sing, don’t tweet. It’s hard to create an original voice, especially in only 140 characters. Even the words Twitter and tweet are shrill and silly, positioning Twitter users as a treeful of discombobulated sparrows. And too many tweets are consistent with that stereotype. Palmer manages to sing on Twitter, consistently bringing her personality across. She’s sometimes raucous and profane, sometimes tender, but always genuine. A word count of her tweets would yield lots of F-bombs, but also, frequently, the word love. And it always feels as if she’s talking to her best friend – not issuing a press release, or nattering on for her own benefit (two huge Twitter traps).

Action Step for Non-Rock Stars: Honing our Twitter personas is something few of us concentrate on. Reread your last 25 tweets, imagining that you’ve never met yourself. Would you want to?

2. Connect the dots. Palmer blogs frequently, posting photos, songs, and video content. She references new website content frequently on Twitter, and it always feels as if she’s doing so to keep her fans in the loop, rather than to blast out a marketing message.

Action Step for Non-Rock Stars: When you get published somewhere – even on your own blog – do you tweet it? If you work for a company that gets a mention somewhere online, do your followers know about it? We hear a lot about oversharing, but undersharing (and excessive modesty) can also be an issue. Which way do your tweets trend?

3. Leap on the moment. An event that’s already entered into music biz lore occurred last May, when Palmer tweeted about staying home alone on a Friday night. The tweets grew into a tongue-in-cheek Losers of Friday Night on their Computers club, complete with t-shirts that netted Palmer thousands of dollars in sales – all based on a Twitter exchange over the course of a few hours. This was not premeditated. It was beautiful, intuitive capitalistic improv.

Action Step for Non-Rock Stars: Are you having conversations on Twitter? When people retweet your posts, do you thank them, check out their profiles, follow the interesting ones, ask them questions? The ripple effects can be substantial.

4. Be enthusiastic. How many of our collective tweets convey pure joy? There’s a huge amount of revelry in Palmer’s Twitter style. She often writes about people who make her happy, cool odd moments in her day, what a great time she had playing a show. She takes pleasure in her life and uses Twitter to express that.

Action Step for Non-Rock Stars: Again, reread your last 25 tweets. How many of them are positive? Can you bump up the joyfulness without getting saccharine? Positive tweetage lowers blood pressure and lengthens life spans, both for writers and readers. (OK, I made that up – but it wouldn’t surprise me!) Palmer’s clearly having huge amounts of fun with Twitter, and translating that fun into new fans, even-more-rabid existing fans, a well-informed follower base, and cold hard cash. As more of us copy her ideas, Twitter will only become a livelier and more musical place. Ms. Palmer, we whose tweets are like baby goose-honks in comparison to your punk cabaret symphony salute you!