Using Twitter

What is Twitter?

This brief outline covers twitter for beginners as a way of helping you understand why it can be worth investing the time into using this amazing tool.

Twitter is best described as a micro blogging platform. You are limited to 140 characters each time you do an update, which initially, may seem a small amount but as you become more experienced, it is amazing what you can fit into 140 characters.

Twitter is a huge global chat room, but then again, it doesn't have to be. It all depends on how many people you follow on Twitter. If it's in the thousands, then your “Tweetstream” will be running fast and furious with everything that is coming in. If you are only following a few hundred, or even less, then things are much easier to keep up with. Twitter is also a great way to meet new people online, particularly those with similar interests to you.

Why use Twitter?

Because it is another site to leave your domain name and get traffic to your site.
Because millions of people use it and it is an easy way to find your target market.
When you use your keywords in Twitter other people looking for those keywords find you
The search engines are bringing up Twitter results so there is another opportunity for something you say to be found.

Get the most out of twitter by setting up your bio

You have 160 characters here to “sell” yourself. Take some time over it and do it well. Don't simply enter a bunch of keywords as they appear totally uninteresting to people, although they may get you found. Use keywords by all means, but start your Bio with the words “I am” and then describe yourself. So you might put for example:-

I am a keen gardener and hiker who also has a passion for the outdoors, internet marketing and affiliate marketing who also loves social media.

Now that description is only 143 characters, so you could still get some more keywords in the bio. No doubt you can see the ones that are there which are gardener, hiker, internet marketing, affiliate marketing and social media. Using these terms in your bio will have you coming up in search results when people are looking for other like minded individuals to follow. As you can see, it is worth taking some time to get the bio right.

If you can use your keyword in your Twitter name then do that or use your own name. You can find me at

http://www.twitter.com/dianecorriette

and

http://twitter.com/locallivesearch

Once you go live you will be able to search your email accounts to find your friends on Twitter which is a great way to start following people – some people will follow you and some won’t – just make sure you begin to reach out to your target market.

Getting started with Twitter

Start getting some tweets into the system now. On the Twitter home page, it asks What You Are Doing. Quite frankly many people don't care until you have built a relationship with them as a result of following so start by sending information through that is relevant to your niche but is not all about you!
Share valuable tips, quotes and news about your industry for the first few weeks and forget about your desire to rush in and talk about yourself.

Whatever you do, at no stage of your Twitter career start posting sales tweet after sales tweet. Your career will be shortlived if you do and people will unfollow you very quickly. Twitter is about engagement, value and a social experience. A constant flow of sales links is just not on.

By all means post links to your products or sites, but keep them to around 5% of your total tweets at the most.

Replies

You can reply to someone's Tweet simply by putting the @symbol in front of their name. This makes the tweet stand out to them as it appears in their reply column or page instead of in the general Tweetstream. It is a very useful way of starting conversations with people in order to build relationships. Simply comment on one of their tweets.

Retweeting
People appreciate retweets and it is a good way to get noticed by others. All you do is click on the RT button which will automatically bring the message up into your tweet space and press send.

Quality versus quantity

If you are into marketing, then quantity of followers will be important to you. It's like building a list. But if you want to keep things personal, then quality of followers will be what you need. Either way, the next step will be to find some people to follow.

Gaining Followers

You need to first be aware that rushing out and following a heap of people can make you look like a potential Twitter spammer. Build your following base slowly. As time goes on, if you are chasing quantity, then you will be able to add more at a time, but initially I would suggest you stick to 50 for a start. The reason for this is that when you follow people, they will most likely follow you back.

Many people don't do this automatically, although some do, particularly in the internet marketing space. Some people will actually go and look at your Twitter home page to decide if you are worth following or not in their eyes. This is where your profile and the settings that you took all the trouble to do will stand you in good stead.

Twellow
Twellow, at http://www.twellow.com is a great way of finding people to interact with. People here are categorized into all different areas and you can search for those with similar interests to your own. The main page shows you all the categories, which then have sub categories as well. You just click on a category and the list of people in that area are displayed. You don't have to be registered with Twellow to be displayed, but by all means register yourself and set up a profile so others can find you.

When you click on a category, Twellow displays a list of people in that category and they are ordered by the number of followers they have. If you are already logged into Twitter you will be able to follow people directly from the screens where the profiles are displayed.

SocialToo
SocialToo at http://www.socialtoo.com is a useful automated tool for Twitter. At Social Too, you can set your account up to do some autopilot things for you.
First of all, you can set SocialToo up to automatically follow everyone who follows you. This can take the drudgery out of checking all your new followers and then going and adding them to your own list in order to reciprocate.
You can also set up SocialToo to send an automatic Direct Message to people who follow you. Don't do it! Automatic Direct Messages are absolutely hated by most of the Twitter community, particularly experienced users because they can pick them a mile off. It's a sterile and rude way of starting out a relationship with new followers.

The backlash against this has largely been caused because many newbies, and some old hands too, were setting up an auto Direct Message that basically said, “Hello, thanks for following me. Now go and visit my sales page at http://..... “. I'm sure you get the picture. I can't think of any worse way to start a relationship with a new follower on Twitter. In any sort of business, you build relationships before you try and sell someone something and this is even more relevant in the social media space.

SocialToo will also provide you with an email every day of all your new followers and those that have unfollowed you as well.

Another function of SocialToo is that it will automatically unfollow anyone who unfollows you. Personally I don't think this is a bad thing. If people aren't interested in you any longer, then are you really interested in them? If you really want to keep the updates from someone, just go and follow them back when you see their name on your unfollows email each day.

SocialOomph
SocialOmmph at http://www.socialoomph.com/ is a fantastic tool to use with Twitter. It allows you to schedule tweets for various times of the day. So how can this be of use to you? Well you need to remember that the Twitter audience is constantly changing and the tweetstream occurs quite fast. The more people someone follows, the greater the number of tweets appearing and they won't read them all, I promise you. It just isn't possible. By using Social Oomph, you have a much greater chance of catching people's attention throughout the day and in different time zones.

Let's say you have written a post on your blog and you want to drive some traffic there. Rather than tweeting the link and subject once, you can do it every hour for 24 hours if you like using Social Oomph. I'm sure you can see the power of this in terms of driving traffic or getting noticed.

There is a free and a professional version. Start out with the free version and then if you need it, upgrade to the professional version when you are ready.

Twitterfeed
Twitterfeed at http://www.twitterfeed.com is also a very handy tool. It is far more secure to log into than the other sites I have mentioned as it uses Open ID which is a bit of a pain. However, it is worth persisting with in the absence of an alternative tool.

What Twitterfeed does is that you can set up your blog to feed directly via RSS to your Twitter account. So every time you make a blog post, it gets tweeted automatically on your behalf. You can use this in conjunction with Tweetlater with the first post coming through Twitterfeed and then subsequent ones at times you specify via Tweetlater.

Twitter is absolutely fantastic application whether you use it for business or pleasure and I hope the above tips and resources help to make it a fantastic and profitable experience for you. Now watch the video on how to set up your own Twitter account.

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