Be the Best Twitterer – Some tips for Using Twitter

Twitter is a micro-blogging service and it is very hot now.

By following tips, you can be the best twitterer.

1. Set up a good profile: offer people a preview what your tweets going to disclose.
2. Add a profile picture: to make your tweets more personal, add a profile photo of yourself.
3. Use a simple and short Twitter name: If you use a longer Twitter ID then it will take more space, and a complex name can make it hard for people to reply or mention you.
4. Add a link to your profile that notifies more about you: Add your blog, or an about me page, or any other page that recommends more information about the person behind the tweets.
5. Post photos: Post photos on Twitter and insert some interest to your stream.
6. Make use of correct grammar: make your tweets understandable and clear but occasional you can use abbreviations as passable.
7. Specify your location: Many people will follow you if they know where you are, because lots of people use Twitter for local networking.
8. Find out the lingo: try to know about what DM, @, RT, and other Twitter symbols stand for, look them up.
9. Don’t be in hurry to build your network: allow your following to grow organically. Don’t follow hundreds of people right away.
10. Use @ to Reply someone: Place a @ sign in front of someone’s name on Twitter to write to them specifically, or simply just mention them-they will be notified that you did so.
11. Use smaller/short URLs: Use a URL shortener like TinyURL, bit.ly or is.gd etc.
12. Use your mobile device: Tweet from your phone, iPod, or other mobile device to keep your Twitter updated on the go, using the mobile web or text.
13. Find your friends: In order to find your friends, classmates, organizations, and others that you may want to follow on Twitter, you can use Twitter’s search option.
14. Leave your profile and tweet public: maintain your tweet public so that people can get to know you before deciding to blindly follow.
15. Use a hashtag (#): Make it easy for others to find your tweets Use a hashtag (#) to be a part of the most popular conversation.
16. Use abbreviations: to save space and reading effort, use of codes like LOL, BRB, and NSFW.
17. Use appropriate words: Use only the words that are completely necessary to get your message across.
18. You can make your account private if you don’t want to share your updates with the world.

Tips for Finding Friends on Twitter

You need to build your own community and find people to follow.

1. Find people with similar interests: Check out Twitter directories to find people in your niche and interests, as well as those in your location.
2. Don’t be anxious in finding followers: focus on building good relationships with those you follows. Twitter isn’t about quantity, but quality.
3. Follow genuine/real people: The people who want to game the system-build relationships with people, just avoid them.
4. Keep an eye on Facebook statuses: Many Facebook users tie their status to Twitter-if you see any @ signs in there, chances are they are on Twitter.
5. Share your passions in life: Discuss your hobbies and interests, and hash tag them so others can find you-and find others this way as well.
6. Register yourself in directories: Make sure you’re easy to find by putting your Twitter name in relevant directories.
7. Get out from behind the screen: Participate in meet ups to meet your followers face to face, and get connected with others.
8. Be informative: Share links, video, and more in order to be interesting and valuable to the Twitter discussion.
9. Follow influencers: Follow significant people on Twitter and interact with them to get lots of value.
10. Follow the people that you think are interesting: Listen to people that say things you’re interested in hearing.
11. Be funny and interesting: Make your timeline entertaining so that others will want to follow you.
12. Make yourself an authority: Share invaluable knowledge that would be missed if you stopped tweeting.

Tips for Keeping Followers

Once you’ve got followers, be sure to keep them by following these strategies.

1. Don’t spam: unnecessary DMs, repeated messages, and constant annoying information will get you unfollowed quickly.
2. Follow back: If someone is following you, and they offer some value, go ahead and follow them back-you can always take it back later. For goodness sakes, just reciprocate.
3. Don’t make Twitter an extension of your blog: Twitter isn’t RSS. Twitter about your blog, but go beyond it as well.
4. Take it easy: Don’t tweet incessantly-or you’ll flood the windows of others so much that they’ll want to stop listening.

Tips for Tweeting

These are some of the ideas and things you can tweet about.

1. Share your announcements: Let people know about your achievements-shows, interviews, big trips.
2. Tweet useful links: if you found something interesting, useful, or funny then share it with your Twitter network.
3. Have fun: Just be social, make connections, and use Twitter for good.
4. Share multimedia: Twitter loves who share photos, videos, and more, so share good multimedia.
5. Update daily: Update at least once a day so your followers have something to follow along with.

Tips for Developing Relationships

Try to develop a good relationships with your Twitter followers.

1. Ask questions, give answers: invite others for giving their opinions to improve relationships. Reply on other’s queries, if you know the answers.
2. Check your @ replies regularly: Make sure you know who is mentioning you by looking at your @ replies, and responding to them.
3. Act as a team with others: Share information and work closely with others in your niche on Twitter.
4. Show appreciation: If someone’s helped you out, be sure to thank them publicly.
5. Be a human being: Share personal information too and show people that you’re a human being.
6. Offer value: give people a reason to listen when you tweet by sharing your knowledge.
7. Give shout outs: Mention your Twitter friends and give them the spotlight.
8. Meet off of Twitter: Go to Tweetups and meet other users, or organize your own.
9. Retweet: retweet,if someone shared a valuable information, and you can simultaneously share it with more people and show the person you retweeted that you appreciate them.
10. Answer to every reply: If someone writes directly to you, be sure to acknowledge them by responding to their tweet.
11. Be authentic: Avoid being false-stay honest and let people see yourself.
12. Keep an eye on your reply ratio: track the ratio of normal tweets to reply tweets in balance in order to stay original while still actively engaging others.
13. Take extended or private conversations to DM: If there’s a privacy issue involved, don’t Tweet in public-share via DM.

Tips for Getting Value

How you can get the best value out of Twitter? Here are the tips-

1. Join the chat: Read what others are doing and reply to what you’re interested in.
2. Ask for help: you can use Twitter to get your questions answered and find a lending hand.
3. Try to keep your tweets short enough to retweet: If you want to be retweeted, make sure to leave extra space for at least “RT @yourname” to be adjoined.
4. Keep up with the Twitter blog: Find out about technical problems, community issues, and more from the Twitter blog.
5. Keep on active: Don’t use Twitter passively-be an active user to get the most value from it.
6. Follow the news: Twitter is a great resource for breaking news-often beating typical media to the punch by hours.
7. Try to tweet during peak times: People are most likely to see your tweets during US business hours, so time your usage accordingly.
8. Stay on top of your friends: Use Twitter as a service to stay well connected with your real-life friends.
9. Track mentions of keywords: Set up a service to inform you whenever certain keywords are used on Twitter.

But some actions that are best avoided on Twitter. They are –

1. Remember to tweet like your grandma’s listening: Twitter is public, and even if you keep things private, you can never be too careful.
2. Give information about links: Don’t just share links without any explanation-tell your followers why they need to visit.
3. Keep it all to one tweet: You’re limited to 140 characters-keep it that way unless it’s absolutely necessary.
4. Don’t share EVERYTHING you do: Don’t share useless details about your cat or grilled cheese sandwich for lunch-make things a little more interesting.
5. Stop arguing: Debate is fine, but too much tense back and forth will turn followers off.
6. Avoid automatic DMs: Don’t set up your account to send welcome DMs to new followers-it’s considered impersonal and bad form.
7. Make sure your background doesn’t look like an advertisement: Many users choose to customize their background-just be careful not to take it too far.
8. Keep your follow to following ratio fairly even: You should be following about the same amount of people who follow you-too far either way makes you look like a spammer or a snob.
9. Don’t expect unrelated people to follow you back: If your Twitter is all about how you sell real estate in California, someone in Texas with no unifying interests to you is just not likely to want to reciprocate.
10. Don’t be an island: Engage your followers, and show that you’re a part of the community.
11. Don’t make it a following contest: If your main goal on Twitter is to amass as many Twitter followers as possible, you’ll end up turning a lot of followers off.
12. Do not auto respond: Autoresponders take the personality out of Twitter-individually connect instead.
13. Don’t always push your agenda: Twitter is a great marketing tool, but it will backfire on you if you abuse it.

If you’re a business on Twitter, then follow these tips –

1. Don’t automate: Impersonality is the bane of Twitter-you’ll get more attention by engaging others and being genuine.
2. Use a photo instead of a logo: Make your Twitter account more personal with a photo.
3. Share your events: Make things interesting and possibly meet your followers through events.
4. Be personal: Show character and enforce a friendly brand for your company.
5. Share contests: Get followers more interested in what you tweet by holding contests.
6. Create multiple accounts if necessary: Set up an official account and others for individual employees if you’d like.
7. Follow relevant people: Connect with colleagues, journalists, competitors, and people who love your brand.
8. Share your business culture with OHs (overheards): Let people listen in to what’s happening in your office by repeating fun moments and comments.
9. Gather information: Ask Twitter followers what they’d like to see from you, and how you can improve.
10. Monitor your brand: Use alerts to find out what people are saying about your business, and respond to them.
11. Share your media: Link to videos, interviews, and more so followers can learn more about you and your business.
12. Talk back: connect with those who engage you-and don’t be afraid to start conversations.

Tips that will help you to keep Productivity & Organization

1. Use a client: Whether you’re on a mobile device or you’re on desktop, get some help from clients like TwitterFon, Twirl, or TweetDeck.
2. Don’t feel like you have to read every tweet: You will miss some tweets, and that’s OK.
3. Limit your Twitter time: Check in occasionally, but don’t let Twitter keep you from more important things.
4. Don’t feel pressured to follow everyone back: While you generally should follow those who follow you, if someone offers no value to you, don’t feel guilty about not following them back.

What you can do Beyond Twitter? Some tips-

1. Link your Twitter and Facebook: Use the Twitter app on Facebook to automatically update your status whenever you update Twitter.
2. Put your blog posts on Twitter: Share blog post links on Twitter to reach a greater audience.
3. Share your Twitter ID: Put your Twitter ID on your email, business cards, and other social media networks so others will know you’re on the service.
4. Tell others about Twitter: Get people in your real life on Twitter, and you’ll have a great new way to communicate with them.
5. Include a link to tweet blog posts: On your blog, place a link that allows readers to send out a tweet about your post.

Source : http://jimgrygar.byethost12.com/100-tips-essential-to-being-a-smarter-better-twitterer/

Measure Twitter Influence & Reach with Tools

Twitter is a social networking and microblogging site, owned and operated by Twitter Inc., which enables its users to share information. User can send and read other user’s messages. In Twitter updates are called tweets.

Do you want to know how effectively you have been communicating with your followers? Then just use these online tools that will help you find out your reach, communication effectiveness, popularity and analyze your twitter usage statistics.

• Observe whom you Re-Tweet most / active hours etc

Tool name – TweetStats. Finds your twitter frequency, whom you re-tweet most, whom you reply to most, what times you tweet most and lots more.

• Find out your Reader Outreach Power

Twitter Analyzer gives you data such as your tweet frequency on a graph, tweet re-tweet count, Readers Reach etc.

• In which Tweet gained you followers and which made you lose them

Tweet Effect dishes out data not seen in many other tools. This tool tells you how many followers you’ve lost in the last X hours, how many you gained during that time. And also an idea of the tweets that might have helped you gain OR lose followers.

• Measure your Social Capital, Velocity and Centralization on Twitter

Reach, Velocity and Social Capital. Twinfluence helps you find three major factors that control your influence and power on Twitter.

• Detect who’s the popular Twitter user in your country/ region

Twitter Grader – notify you who’s the best in the region based on number of followers, communication, retweets, influence etc. A far more effective calculation compared to other such tools.

• Observe your average Twitter usage over a period of time

Tweet Rush will help you in finding out your twitter usage stats, how long, when and how often do you tweet at a particular time period.

• Note your Twitter Rank

Twitter Rank will give you a “Twitter Rank” based on your trust quotient or something similar.

• Find out how many people you reached via your tweets

Use Tweet Reach to analyze how many impressions your tweets got in a particular time frame.

• Get your influence, signal-noise ratio and velocity

Twitlyzer is an excellent tool, that calculates your influence, quality and velocity of tweets. It allows you to compare the stats with other users and generate charts !

Written by Mani Karthik

For more information, please visit http://www.dailybloggr.com/2009/06/9-tools-to-measure-your-twitter-influence-reach/

Factors That We Should Remember While Tweeting

Now several big and small businesses utilize Twitter to do their marketing. Within a couple of years, after Twitter was launched in 2006, Twitter didn’t take much time to find its scope for marketing. It became such a rage that it is sometimes described as the “sms of the Internet”. It got so much popularity worldwide that now it enjoys more than100 million users.

It’s a miracle how a small tweet can bring so much revenue. But the truth is there are companies and businesses that find their customers through Twitter.

Some factors that we should remember while tweeting to get more followers and eventually more customers:

• Should have a professional profile that is impressive as well

Your profile represents your business online. Keep a profile that is informative, impressive and professional. Add your company website in the profile so that users get to know your products or services. Adding your company logo also gives you an identity of your own in Twitter.

• Should have clarity in what you say

Because you are forced to say what you want in 140 characters, you might give your messages in short forms, abbreviations or just some random mix of words with hidden meanings. Followers do not spend time decoding what you have said. Hence, be clear and precise.

• Provide information

There is no point tweeting just anything so that you could stay in the loop. Provide information for that is what your followers want and that is why they are following you. Tell them about your latest products or events. Tell them why they should buy from you. These details are what followers are looking from you.

• Be brief

As characters are limited, Brevity is of course the only option you have in Twitter. In fact, it is even better if you can bring it down to 120 as in case someone wants to reply, their message wouldn’t be cut short with your name coming in front of the reply. Also, make sure you shorten your links using shortening tools that you can find plenty on the Internet.

• Keywords

When users search for you they use keywords that are related to business. Hence, make sure you use the important business keywords in your tweets that let users find you fast.

• Provide user friendly links

When you have something descriptive to tweet, it is a good practice to add a link in tweet but make sure that this link should not direct to a blank page or a non-existing page. It should load fast. Similarly, the content in the page that the link leads to should be easy and interesting to read.

• Give importance to your followers

If you go on tweeting only about what you do or what you are planning to do, followers would lose interest very soon. Make sure you are talking about them too. Add “you” in all your tweets. Tell them why they should listen to you and what is their benefit if they do so. Provide space for them to reply with their queries by shortening your tweet to 120 characters or lesser.

• Do not protect your tweets

Protecting your tweets for your business would be stupidity. So keep your tweets open for users to find them and follow them.

Today, nonexistence in Twitter puts you down in the business world when your competitors move up higher due to their efficient social media marketing. So, create an impressive profile in Twitter and watch your business grow.

Ref : The Web Clinic’s Admin

Build Links with Twitter

Social media marketing platforms like Twitter can be used for their link building efforts. A very few internet markers must be conscious of the opportunities provided by Twitter. Twitter cannot just be used as a tool to strengthen your link building campaign but can also be employed as a communicative pitch to build links and keep abreast of the latest gossip.

Let’s take a look at the link building views with Twitter:

1. Research Your Industry Specific Websites on Twitter

You can recognize hundreds of websites within your niche and industry with whom you can communicate and build links by searching Twitter through tools like Twitter Search. Enter your related keywords when search in Twitter, see who is talking about them, visit their website through their Twitter profile and ask them for a link exchange.

2. Contact Website Owners

After examining, jot down those contacts from whom you want to acquire links. It’s better to step by step build a relationship before contacting them directly, this will save you from being rejected because if you are an active follower of a person, they’ll never want to let you go and easily allow links exchange. Many times, they’ll be glad that you asked.

3. Remain an Updated Link-Builder with Twitter

If you’re a person who doesn’t know what the latest trends are, be lucky with Twitter. Find the latest gossip encircling your niche, see the generators of those stories, and listen to them. The more you know what’s going on within your business area, the more link building chances you’ll be able to explore.

4. Quality Back Links with Twitter

Twitter also holds manual link building benefits through tweets. Although the links on Twitter are no followed but by building your followers list and enhancing the Page Rank of your Twitter profile, you can obtain some quality back links for your website. How? By inserting keywords into a tweet, integrating keywords into your short URL, making your tweets linkable, making tweets retweetable and posting tweets at the most retweetable time of the day.

By SeoGP

Some Twitter Tips

Seeing as how Twitter is becoming more and more popular amongst businesses (even Walmart uses it!) I have decided to give you a quick over view of some Twitter best practises.

Top 10 Twitter Tips:

1)    Make objectives about what you want to achieve by using Twitter, and stick to them.

• You need to know what you want to achieve with Twitter.
• If there are too many things, create more than one account – each one should have its own agenda and credibility.
• Think about your user name. If you want to build up awareness for your own name brand, use your name, but if you want to build up your company name, you could try a mix of your name and the company name or just the company – depending on the length of your company name.

2)    When you add your avatar try not to add a picture of you wearing a giant silly hat, or you sitting in a boardroom.

• You want to be a human as well as professional. You also want to inspire confidence in your business capabilities and not look like a joker. Keep it simply you –and enforce your brand (whether it’s a personal brand, company brand, or your voice in the company brand).

3)    Add your URL and a small bio to your profile.

• People will have an online reference to learn about what you are offering them or what else there is to learn about you. Your profile reflects your brand.

4)    Twitter is like micro blogging.

• Your messages have a limit of 140 characters. Make them count.

5)    Twitter is no longer there just to tell people that your dog had 5 adorable puppies and you have decided to name them all Bob and Trudy.

• Now is the time to use Twitter to tell people about your business goals, your professional interests, to spread knowledge and offer customer support. Use your own ideas to spread the messages – be unique!

6)    That said, by no means is it deemed acceptable to spam your followers with “Tweets”* only concerning your company and how great it is.

• This is a sure fire way to either lose follower or not gain any. Add a human touch by passing on the link to an article you found funny or interesting.
• Tweet about issues you have online, things you found on your way to work, ask questions and reply to what other “Twits (or Tweeps)”** say.
• Offer customer support for example. Be useful but keep a balance.

7)    Add followers who you think you can learn from.

• Hopefully they will think the same of you and follow you in return. It’s about building up a network here, the more useful all the connections are the better for you and everyone who networks with you.
• This means not automatically following people who follow you too.
• Depending on what you want to achieve, it seems logical that you would only follow people who have things to say that you find useful or interesting in any way. This is a chance to gain new blog readers, newsletter subscribers or software users. Again, this depends on what you want to achieve with Twitter.

8)    If you like what one of your followers  contributed, say so!

• By “Retweeting”*** what one of your followers or someone you are following says, you let them know that you found what they said interesting and that you are willing to share it with others . You could also reply to them or send a direct message and let them know.
• To retweet something, users typically type in “Retweeting” and the user name with an @ in front of it to show who posted it originally e.g. “Retweeting @LeilaPan” then paste the Tweet here. You can also use “Retweet” button.
• To reply to someone you type in the user name with an @ before it e.g. “@LeilaPan nice article!”. Users can be notified when they get these replies so they will know you replied to them or retweeted their message and may be more inclined to return the favour.
• Try to keep  a balance though, people can see when you are Tweeting your own messages or when you are replying or Retweeting – make sure you have your own voice.

9)    Use Twitter regularly.

• The more you use it, the more interaction people see. The more use people see in following you and the more followers you will receive!

10)    Twitter can give you insight you may not have had before.

• It can form part of your online reputation management. Track what people say about you or your company, or both!
• See if people are Tweeting your articles. By responding to what people say about your brand you build up your network and credibility.

Of course there are many Twitter tools and resources out there to help you use the application as best you can. It’s all about using it and finding out what works for you. You might also want to brush up on your Twitter lingo (you could even make up your own Twords! Twitter words…that one’s all mine.) Twittering can be fun, and keeps the communication lines with your target audience wide open.

The most important thing to remember is that this takes time, but it is becoming more and more widely accepted as a way to interact with existing and potential customers or even your niche heroes.

Ref : *December 12th, 2008 | by Leila Davies |