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 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.
There are a few ways to make your twittering more effective and efficient. I’m going to give you seven ideas about what I do.
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. 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. Check out twhirl.com. This is a program you download to your computer that sits on your desktop and display tweets from others without having to have your browser open. Of course, you can post your own tweets there, too. One neat thing about twhirl is it has a built-in url shortener in it. If you have a long link to post, you might now have enough space. In twhirl, you can just enter the link into a box and click “shorten” and you’ll get a short link that you can use in your tweet.
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. 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!
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