Twitter is hot - 7 ways to make it sizzle!
Sep 14th, 2008 by Matt Hellstrom
Twitter is a great way to connect with your friends and colleagues. What is Twitter, you ask? It’s what’s called a micro-blogger, a website where you can post little message of 140 characters or less about what you’re doing, and they get broadcast out to anyone that’s following you. You’re messages can be about anything, but if you’re an internet marketer they should be a combination of business and personal ones.
Are you building a presence on the web? Then you need to let people know what you’re doing. Twitter can help with that. If you make a new post to your blog, send out a tweet. If you put a YouTube video up there, let your friends and followers know.
On the other hand, make sure that you don’t post only business type of posts. If you do, your followers are just going to think you’re pitching them and they either won’t pay attention to what you’re saying, or they’ll “unfollow” you. That’s what social networking, or web 2.0 is all about - being social. Even if you’re totally focused on your business and you don’t do much else, you need to find something, anything, to talk about.
Maybe you lost a bunch of weight. Maybe you’re an aspiring singer. Maybe you like to bowl, golf, play poker, or walk your dog. Whatever it is, talk about it from time to time. If people realize you’re actually a person, they’ll be more drawn to you.
Here are 7 things I do to build my twitter empire in the most efficient way possible.
1. Follow a lot of people. Here’s how I did that: I found someone that was already on Twitter that had similar interests as me, social and attraction marketing, and started following everyone he was following. When I got up to 2000, Twitter wouldn’t let me follow any more, and I assume they have a limit. However, I have seen people that are following more than 2000, so there must be some kind of criteria, probably involving how many are following you. Anyway, if you follow enough people, a bunch of them are going to follow you back. When they do, send them a tweet with a link to your blog.
2. When someone follows you, follow them back. Pretty soon, people will start to follow you that you didn’t follow in the first place. (They probably found you the same way you got started). When they follow you, follow them and send a similar message to them as you did above. If you’re already at 2000 people, go in and delete a few that aren’t following you. I get rid of the ones that don’t have a picture, because they probably aren’t too serious about Twitter. Which leads to point 3.
3. Set up your profile. Add a picture. Tell about yourself. Put your blog link out there. Remember, we’re trying to be social - even us computer geeks!
4. Go into your Facebook account and add the Twitter application. You’re not on Facebook? Well fix that problem now! You absolutely must be on Facebook if you’re serious about social marketing, it’s that important. The way that works is when you make a post on Twitter, it will post the same thing on Facebook. Twice as many people will see what you’re doing with the same amount of effort.
5. Try out twhirl. This is a desktop application that displays tweets from others without having to be on the twitter site. You can also post your own tweets there, and more. What I like about this program is that it has a url shortener built into it. If you want to post a long link in one of your tweets, you might run out of space because you can only have posts of 140 characters or less. Using twhirl, you can enter the url into a box and click “shorten” and it will give you a short little link that you can put in your post. Download twhirl at twhirl.com.
6. Twitterfeed, for blogs. If you have a blog, you might be interested in twitterfeed. This is a website where you can register your blog or blogs, and whenver you make a post it will automatically update twitter. If works off your RSS feed and checks once an hour to see if there are any new posts out there. You can set this up at twitterfeed.com - free!
7. Tie it in with ezinearticles.com. There is a place in your ezinearticles profile that allows you to put your twitter information in there so that when one of your articles gets approved it will automatically send out a tweet. Same idea as above.
So there you have it! Seven simple ways to put twitter to work for you. Go ahead and get signed up if you’re not already, and put some or all of these ideas in motion and you’ll rapidly increase your web of content and sphere of influence!
