Sunday, February 15, 2009

Twitter Micro-Blogging Is Cool - Take Full Advantage of it!

By Matt Hellstrom

Do you know what Twitter is? If not, you should - it's one of the hottest web 2.0 things going right now! Twitter is a website that enables you to send out little "micro-blogs" of 140 characters or less to anyone that's following you (that's like friends in Facebook). You can let people know what you're doing at any time, and this can be pretty cool. These messages can be business or personal, and should be both.

For you internet marketers, obviously you're going to want some of your "tweets" to be concerning your business. For example, if you post a new Squidoo lens, tweet it. If you learn about a cool new website, let your 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 like to play the piano, or read romance novels. Tell people about the good ones! Maybe you're a Packers fan and you can't believe Brett Favre is wearing a Jets uniform. Maybe you like to knit, crochet, or macrame (does anyone still do that). Whatever it is, let people know once in awhile and they're sure to like you more.

Here are 7 things I do to build my twitter empire in the most efficient way possible.

1. Find a bunch of people to follow. What you need to do is find someone that has similar interests as you and follow everyone they are following. Eventually, you're going to get to the point where you're following 2000 people, and twitter won't let you follow any more. They must have some kind of system where they limit you to 2000 unless you have more people following you, because I have seen people that are following more than 2000. Here's what will happen - if you follow enough people, many of them will follow you back. At that point, send them a friendly message, and invite them to take a look at your blog.

2. Follow your followers. Before you know it, people are going to start following you that you didn't follow first. Go ahead and follow them back, and send them a tweet with your blog address in it. If you can't follow any more because you're at the limit, delete a few that don't have pictures and haven't followed you. Those guys probably aren't too serious about Twitter anyway. This brings up my next point.

3. Personalize your site. Add your picture. Write about yourself, and post a background image. Put your blog or website link on it. Remember, you need to be social - even if you're not!

4. If you're on Facebook, tie it together with Twitter. If you're not on Facebook, get with it! It's crucial that you're on the most popular social sites, and Facebook is definitely up there in the top 2. When you tie them together, it makes it so that when you send a tweet, it automatically updates the "what are you doing" part of Facebook. By the way, you can find friends on Facebook the same way you did on Twitter.

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. If you have one or more blogs, use twitterfeed. Twitterfeed automatically posts any new entries to twitter, and consequently Facebook. It works off your RSS feed and checks periodically for new blog posts, and if it sees any it sends out a tweet! This is just one more way to save yourself time and not have to remember so much. Set it up for free at twitterfeed.com.

7. Sign up for automatic updates from ezinearticles.com. In the profile section of that site, you can put in your twitter username and password and it will automatically set out a tweet when an article you wrote gets approved. Very cool.

There you go! 7 ideas to make twitter better. Get out there and start tweeting soon. It will help to develop your web of content and get people to notice what you're doing! - 15784

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